OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares 'Code Red,' prioritizes ChatGPT improvements and puts advertising on hold in light of Gemini's success

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared a 'Code Red' emergency within the company due to the success of Google's Gemini AI program. Altman has indicated that he will prioritize improving ChatGPT, putting

The news site The Information and the Wall Street Journal reported that an emergency had been declared within OpenAI. According to the Wall Street Journal, which has seen an internal memo, CEO Sam Altman has prioritized improving the quality of ChatGPT and will postpone other initiatives.

In the AI industry, OpenAI is a pioneer and a leader among other manufacturers, and ChatGPT has reached 400 million weekly active users as of February 2025.

The momentum has not stopped since then, and according to OpenAI, the population will exceed 700 million as of September 2025.

However, other manufacturers are also catching up, especially Google, whose other image generation AI, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana), released in August 2025, has been met with great acclaim.

Furthermore, in November 2025, the Gemini 3 was released, which surpassed competing models in benchmark scores.

Additionally, Anthropic's Claude is highly rated by business users. In November 2025, Anthropic released the latest model, 'Claude Opus 4.5,' which offers improved processing capabilities for complex business tasks.

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5, improving coding, PC operation, and complex business tasks - GIGAZINE

While OpenAI is not yet in a losing position, it faces the problem of being costly, and losing popularity to other AIs like Gemini could lead to a decline in users, putting the company's survival at risk.

Taking all these factors into consideration, it appears that CEO Altman decided to prioritize improving ChatGPT even if it meant putting other measures on hold.

Nick Turley, a ChatGPT executive, wrote to X, 'Our focus is on further improving ChatGPT's performance, continuing its growth, and expanding its use around the world, while providing a more intuitive and personal experience. Thank you for three amazing years, and we know there's still a lot of work to be done!'

5/
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. Thanks for an incredible three years. Lots more to do!

— Nick Turley (@nickaturley) December 2, 2025

OpenAI is developing a new AI model, codenamed 'Garlic,' as a countermeasure against Google. Internal evaluations of 'Garlic' show that it outperforms Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 in coding and inference.

OpenAI Developing 'Garlic' Model to Counter Google's Recent Gains — The Information
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-developing-garlic-model-counter-googles-recent-gains

new: OpenAI developed a new model, Garlic, that could bridge gap w/Google in pretraining

fixing pretraining problems is ~crucial~ pic.twitter.com/DgGMBAoXdo

— Amir Efrati (@amir) December 2, 2025