Sam Altman issues a ‘code red’ as ChatGPT’s lead narrows

ChatGPT may be the fastest-growing consumer app of all time, but its competitors are closing the gap in terms of the quality of their AI products – and Sam Altman is feeling the pressure.

OpenAI’s CEO issued a “code red” to employees on Monday as part of an initiative to improve ChatGPT, a move that could delay some of its other products, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited an internal memo.

Altman said OpenAI needs to step up its work to improve its chatbot’s day-to-day experience, including improving its personalization features, making it faster, more reliable, and allowing it to 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 remains the most popular chatbot, with 800 million users per week, compared to Google’s Gemini chatbot, which has only 650 million users per month.

But Google is catching up when it comes to quality. The latest version of Gemini, launched in November, outperformed competitors on a series of key industry benchmarks. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said after two hours of testing that he would “not return” to ChatGPT. Analysts say integrating the model into Google’s search engine gives it distribution advantages that OpenAI can’t match. Meanwhile, Claude from Anthropic, especially the Opus 4.5 model, is considered one of the best AI models for coding.

Altman’s memo reportedly indicated that OpenAI would push back work on other projects to focus on the chatbot. These include advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant tool called Pulse. He said temporary team transfers would be encouraged and the company would host a daily call for those working to improve ChatGPT.

He also wrote that a new OpenAI reasoning model, due to be released next week, is better than Gemini and that the company is getting good results elsewhere.

Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at the company, wrote on