OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared a “code red” at the artificial intelligence startup as rivals narrow the lead of its ChatGPT chatbot, according to internal communications reported by The Wall Street Journal.
In a memo to staff, Altman said ChatGPT’s quality needed improvement to keep pace with competitors, prompting the company to prioritize upgrades to personalization, speed, reliability, and its ability to answer a wider range of questions.
Other initiatives, including advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and the personal assistant Pulse, will be temporarily delayed.
“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,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, posted on X.
The announcement comes as OpenAI faces mounting pressure from rivals. Google recently released Gemini 3, a new version of its AI model that surpassed ChatGPT in benchmark tests and received widespread acclaim. Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users, up from 450 million in July, compared with ChatGPT’s more than 800 million weekly users.
Other competitors are also advancing. Anthropic expects to turn a profit by 2028, earlier than OpenAI’s 2030 target. Chinese AI company DeepSeek recently launched two new models that in some benchmarks matched or exceeded the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.
Altman publicly congratulated Google on the release of Gemini 3, calling it a “great model” on X, while privately telling employees that ChatGPT had fallen behind.
Turley emphasized that OpenAI’s product remains the “number one AI assistant worldwide” and welcomed the competition, saying it pushes the company to “move faster and keep raising the bar for what an AI assistant can do.”
OpenAI is also holding back on introducing ads in ChatGPT, currently being tested in beta, as it focuses on improving core capabilities.