Sam Altman sounds a ‘code red’ warning as ChatGPT’s lead narrows
Altman told OpenAI employees to ramp up work on improving its chatbot, amid forward leaps by Google's Gemini in recent weeks
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ChatGPT might be the fastest-growing consumer app ever, but its competitors are closing the gap on the quality of their AI products — and Sam Altman is feeling the pressure.
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The OpenAI CEO issued a “code red” to employees on Monday as part of a push to improve ChatGPT, a move that could delay some of its other products, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited an internal memo.
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Altman said OpenAI needs to ramp up work on improving the daily experience of its chatbot, including making its personalization features better, speeding it up, making it more reliable, and letting it answer a wider range of questions.
The company had already declared a “code orange” to the same effect. The company uses yellow, orange, and red to describe the urgency it needs to improve its products, people familiar with the matter told the WSJ.
ChatGPT is still the most popular chatbot, with 800 million users per week compared with Google’s Gemini chatbot, which has only 650 million users per month.
But Google is catching up on quality. The newest version of Gemini, released in November, outperformed competitors on a series of key industry benchmarks. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared after two hours of testing that he wasn't “going back” to ChatGPT. Analysts say the model's integration into Google's search engine gives it distribution advantages OpenAI can't match. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude, particularly the Opus 4.5 model, is considered one of the best AI models for coding.
Altman’s memo reportedly said OpenAI will push back work on other projects to focus on the chatbot. Those include advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant tool called Pulse. He said temporary team transfers will be encouraged and that the company will hold a daily call for those working on improving ChatGPT.
He also wrote that a new OpenAI reasoning model set to be released next week is better than Gemini and that the company is performing well elsewhere.
Nick Turley, who is head of ChatGPT at the company, wrote on X on Monday: “Our focus now is to keep making ChatGPT more capable, continue growing, and expand access around the world — while making it feel even more intuitive and personal.”