The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has sent an internal company memo announcing that ChatGPT is now in “code red” mode in an effort to refocus efforts on improving ChatGPT’s basic functions instead of adding new, innovative features.
The memo arrives just as ChatGPT is under renewed threat from competitors like Google, which has just released the well-received Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and Meta, which is investing billions into AI research. Not to mention the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which has casually lobbed two new enormous open source AI models into an already fractious market.
