Sam Altman just sounded the alarm. In an internal memo circulated Monday, OpenAI’s CEO declared a “code red,” the company’s highest urgency designation, ordering employees to drop everything and fix ChatGPT.
The memo’s details were initially revealed by The Information.
The development came as Google’s Gemini 3 surged past OpenAI on key benchmarks last month, while Anthropic continues stealing enterprise clients.
With ChatGPT serving over 800 million weekly users, Altman’s message was blunt: the chatbot that launched the AI revolution is now fighting to stay ahead.
For users, this means faster, more reliable, more personal answers are coming, but flashy new features and ads are taking a back seat.
‘Code red’ inside OpenAI: Gemini pressure, paused ads, and a refocus on the core
OpenAI uses colour codes: yellow, orange, and red to flag internal emergencies. “Code red” is reserved for existential threats.
The memo establishes daily calls among teams responsible for ChatGPT and encourages employees to temporarily switch projects if it accelerates progress.
What’s being shelved? Advertising experiments, AI agents for shopping and health, and a personal assistant called “ChatGPT Pulse” are all paused indefinitely.
The timing is no coincidence. Google’s Gemini 3, released in mid-November, topped the LMArena leaderboard with a historic 1501 Elo score, the first model to breach the 1500 barrier.
User engagement followed: Gemini’s monthly active users climbed from 450 million in July to 650 million by October, with users spending more time per session.
Meanwhile, OpenAI remains unprofitable and capital-hungry, making retention critical. Analysts frame the memo less as panic than as a defensive pivot, protecting OpenAI’s lead before it slips further.
What changes for 800M ChatGPT users
Altman’s memo outlined concrete priorities: better speed, stronger reliability, improved personalization, and the ability to answer a wider range of questions.
Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, reinforced the message on X Monday night:
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.
What users won’t see soon: aggressive ads inside ChatGPT. While code references to advertising were recently spotted in the Android app’s beta version, those experiments are now on hold.
Shopping and health agents, once positioned as ChatGPT’s next frontier, are similarly delayed. The trade-off is intentional.
OpenAI is betting that tightening the core experience: making ChatGPT indispensable for daily tasks, matters more than racing to monetise.
Turley has previously described ChatGPT as accounting for 70% of AI assistant usage and 10% of search activity globally.
Losing that dominance would be far costlier than delayed ad revenue.
Altman hinted that OpenAI’s next reasoning model, due next week, will outperform Gemini 3.
Whether that’s enough to reclaim the crown, or merely buy time, will test whether this code-red gamble pays off as Gemini keeps accelerating.
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