Report: OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ Alert in Face of Increasing Google Gemini Threat

OpenAI has reportedly been caught off guard by Google’s rapid progress with its Gemini AI models, and the situation led CEO Sam Altman to declare a “code red” alert on Monday. In a memo shared with employees viewed by The Information and The Wall Street Journal, Altman announced that OpenAI needed to delay some products and announcements to focus on improving ChatGPT.

“Altman said OpenAI had more work to do on the day-to-day experience of its chatbot, including improving personalization features for users, increasing its speed and reliability, and allowing it to answer a wider range of questions,” the Wall Street Journal report reads. Altman also said in the memo that OpenAI was delaying various initiatives, including advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a new “Pulse” personal assistant.

In reaction to this new competitive landscape, OpenAI is also pushing for temporary team transfers to speed up work on ChatGPT. There will be daily calls for people responsible for improving the quality of ChatGPT, and OpenAI currently plans to release a new reasoning model next week that performs better than Google’s latest Gemini model.

Google just announced yesterday that it was bringing Gemini 3, its most intelligent model, to AI Mode in Google Search in approximately 120 countries and territories in English. Nano Banana Pro, the company’s latest generative imagery model, is also coming to Google’s AI Mode in more countries in English for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

While ChatGPT currently has more than 800 million weekly users, OpenAI is still far from being profitable. The company also has to spend billions of dollars in AI infrastructure to stay ahead of the competition, but without a surge in paid users or the introduction of advertising, the company may not be able to compete with a juggernaut like Google with far more resources.

Google made a nice comeback with Gemini following the rushed launch of its Bard chatbot, and the company also benefits from the ability to integrate Gemini into Search and its Workspace apps. Google Gemini is also coming to more platforms such as Google Home and Google TV, and that should also help to increase mindshare for the AI chatbot.