Sam Altman has reportedly issued a “code red” inside OpenAI as competition in the AI space intensifies. According to internal messages obtained by The Information and The Wall Street Journal, Altman told employees that ChatGPT must improve to keep up with rapidly advancing rivals such as Google’s Gemini.
Google recently launched Gemini 3, which outperformed ChatGPT across multiple benchmarks. The company described it as marking a “new era of intelligence,” highlighting its top score on Humanity’s Last Exam — a test designed to measure potential superintelligence. Gemini 3 also attracted attention for its Nano Banana image generator and stronger reasoning capabilities.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised the model, saying he used ChatGPT daily for years but after spending two hours with Gemini 3, claimed the improvement was “insane.” Altman publicly congratulated Google on X, calling Gemini 3 a “great model,” but internally acknowledged that ChatGPT had fallen behind, writing, “We know we have some work to do, but we are catching up fast.”
OpenAI has not commented on the leaked memo. ChatGPT lead Nick Turley addressed the competitive pressure indirectly on X, saying ChatGPT remains the “number one AI assistant worldwide.” He added that new competing models “push us to move faster,” emphasizing that the company’s focus is on making ChatGPT more capable, more intuitive, and expanding global access.
The leaked memo also reportedly states that OpenAI is delaying plans to introduce ads in ChatGPT, even though it is testing advertisements in beta versions of the app.
