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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has declared a “code red” over the need to improve ChatGPT, as rivals Google and Anthropic narrow its early lead in the race to develop artificial intelligence.

According to an internal memo sent on Monday, Altman said the code red “surge” would refocus OpenAI’s work on ChatGPT, such as improving the speed, reliability and personalisation of the market-leading chatbot.

He told employees the $500bn start-up was planning to delay other products as “we are at a critical time for ChatGPT”.

That means the company will push back plans to develop advertising products, AI agents intended to automate shopping and health-related tasks, and Pulse, which produces personalised morning updates for users.

Details of the memo were first reported by The Information.

The strategic overhaul comes as OpenAI grapples with growing competition, rising data centre costs, the technical challenges of remaining at the frontier of AI and the constant battle to retain key talent.

Last month, Google released its latest large language model, Gemini 3, which is considered to have leapfrogged OpenAI’s GPT-5 on industry benchmark tests. Anthropic’s latest model, Opus 4.5, also outperformed GPT-5 in key benchmarks.

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Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s AI architect and DeepMind’s chief technology officer, said that the Big Tech group had “pushed our performance quite significantly” by training its AI models using Google’s own bespoke chips. The company also said it was integrating its latest AI models into products immediately.

The company also said it had improved the methods used to train its models, an issue that OpenAI has struggled with recently.

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Before the launch of Gemini 3, Altman had said that OpenAI would “need to stay focused through short-term competitive pressure . . . expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit”.

“Search is one of the biggest areas of opportunity. ChatGPT now accounts for roughly 10 per cent of search activity, and it’s growing quickly,” said Nick Turley, vice-president and head of ChatGPT on X on Monday night.

“Our focus now is to keep making ChatGPT more capable, continue growing, and expand access around the world — while making it feel even more intuitive and personal,” Turley added.

With more than 800mn weekly users, OpenAI still has a hugely dominant market share in overall chatbot usage but people are now spending more time chatting with Gemini than ChatGPT, according to data from web analytics company Similarweb.