'Code Red': OpenAI Ups Ante As AI Race With Google Heats Up

Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, declared a 'code red' for the company, in the wake of competitors such as Google and Anthropic closed the distance in the AI race, eating away at the ChatGPT-maker's lead.

Altman reportedly sent a memo to company staff to put initiatives such as advertising, shopping and health agents and a personal assistant, Pulse on the backburner to address the competition and make improvements in ChatGPT in response. These improvements involve core features such as being faster and more reliable, and having more optimised personalisation features, as well as an increased capacity to ask more questions.

The memo, citied by The Wall Street Journal and The Information, also stated that there will be a daily call for those who are working to improve the LLM chatbot.

This also may serve as a moment where things have come full circle as OpenAI's competitor Google had declared code red in 2023, around the time OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the world.

Google is attracting many new users due to the popularity of products such as its Nano Banana image generator as well as the launch of its latest AI model, Gemini 3.

Gemini 3 surpassed its competitors with regards to multiple industry benchmarks and many other notable metrics, according to reports.

Gemini 3 was in turn surpassed by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, which was built with augmented coding features, computer usage and executing complex tasks for enterprise users.

Claude Opus 4.5 beat Gemini 3 and Open AI's GPT 5.1 when it comes to tackling complicated workplace challenges.