Sam Altman declares internal 'Code Red' at OpenAI over Gemini 3 competition

Sam Altman told OpenAI staff in an internal memo that he was declaring a “code red,” directing the company to prioritise improving ChatGPT’s core product over other initiatives, according to reporting by The Information and the Wall Street Journal, which both cited people who had seen or been briefed on the message; no public version of the memo was released.

Altman reportedly told employees to focus on ChatGPT’s “day-to-day experience” — personalisation, response speed and reliability, and the range of questions it could handle well — while delaying planned monetisation features, including advertising, shopping tools and the Pulse personal-assistant product. He described OpenAI as being at a “critical time” for ChatGPT and warned staff that market reaction to Google’s competing release could bring “temporary economic headwinds,” telling them the “vibes out there” would “be rough for a bit.”

The memo followed Google’s release of Gemini 3 two weeks earlier, which had outperformed OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s then-current models on several widely watched benchmarks and shifted press and market narrative toward Google having retaken technical leadership in large language models. Altman was reported to have called Gemini 3 “a great model.”

The episode was a rare public acknowledgement from OpenAI’s leadership of direct competitive pressure from a specific rival release, communicated through unofficial channels rather than a company statement, and it set off an internally reported multi-week push to close the gap with Gemini 3 before returning to shelved monetisation plans.