OpenAI’s top executives are shifting focus toward coding and enterprise, citing Anthropic’s rise as a “wake-up call”.
OpenAI is narrowing its focus to coding tools and enterprise customers, an acknowledgment that its broad, multi-front product strategy has ceded ground to Anthropic, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, outlined the coming changes at a company-wide meeting, saying CEO Sam Altman and chief research officer Mark Chen were in the process of identifying lower-priority work. Employees will learn which areas are affected within the next few weeks.
“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Simo told staff, according to The Wall Street Journal. She added that the company needed to “nail productivity” — particularly for business customers.
Simo said Anthropic’s recent gains should serve as a “wake-up call.” Anthropic has built a dominant position among enterprise and developer customers, driven largely by its Claude Code and Cowork offerings, while OpenAI pursued a broader product slate that included the video generator Sora, a web browser called Atlas, new hardware, and e-commerce features for ChatGPT.
The broad product push created problems inside the company. People who worked at OpenAI described a period of strategic confusion, with compute shifting unpredictably across teams. Reporting lines added to the disorder — the group behind Sora, one of OpenAI’s most visible products, was embedded within research rather than product, according to The Journal.
“We are very much acting as if it’s a code red,” Simo told staff.
On the coding front, a refreshed Codex app and a new professionally oriented model, GPT 5.4, both came out last month. Simo posted on X that Codex’s weekly active users have climbed to more than two million, roughly quadrupling since January. The company has also placed engineers directly with consulting firms and corporate partners to push broader enterprise adoption.
The standalone Sora app debuted last September as a video generator paired with a social feed resembling TikTok. It reached No. 1 on Apple’s App Store but failed to hold its audience. OpenAI plans to bring video capabilities into ChatGPT directly instead.
Both companies are moving toward eventual public listings, with no firm timeline disclosed. In separate reporting, The Journal noted that OpenAI has privately floated a fourth-quarter IPO as one possibility.
