OpenAI to Pare Side Projects To Focus on Its Core Business --- AI pioneer plans to emphasize coding, enterprise work amid pressure from rivals

 

“OpenAI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a "do everything all at once" strategy has put them on the defensive.

 

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, previewed the changes to employees in an all-hands meeting, telling them that top leaders including CEO Sam Altman and chief research officer Mark Chen were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks.

 

"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," Simo told staff last week, according to remarks reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front."

 

Last year, OpenAI announced an array of new products including the video-generator Sora, a web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device, and e-commerce features for ChatGPT.

 

Altman has previously likened this approach to "betting on a series of startups" inside OpenAI, and the strategy helped burnish the company's reputation as the pioneer of the AI era. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

 

OpenAI is under growing pressure from rival Anthropic, which has become the dominant AI provider for businesses because of the viral success of its Claude Code and Cowork offerings. These products, which include so-called agents that can autonomously carry out complex tasks for users, have become all the rage in Silicon Valley, and even sparked a global stock-market selloff last month.

 

Anthropic has placed fewer product bets than OpenAI, focusing its efforts on the enterprise and coding market. The company has so far avoided image and video generation products, for example.

 

OpenAI and Anthropic have taken steps toward public listings that could take place as soon as this year, plans that have added extra urgency to the ferocious competition between the two companies. Neither company has disclosed specific timing, but in some discussions, OpenAI raised the prospect of an initial public offering in the fourth quarter of this year, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

 

Simo told staff Anthropic's success should serve as a "wake-up call" for the company, and that it had to regain the lead among software developers and enterprise customers.

 

Current and former employees said that last year's "do everything" approach sometimes created a lack of focus, and that it was at times difficult to understand OpenAI's strategic direction. That is a problem in many organizations, but the stakes are higher at OpenAI and other frontier labs, where the central issue is how to spend and allocate scarce computing capacity between projects.

 

Computing resources often shifted from one team to another at the last minute, and the company's organizational structure grew complicated, the employees said. For example, OpenAI's Sora team was housed under the research division, even though it was responsible for launching one of the company's most high-profile products, they said.

 

OpenAI launched its stand-alone Sora app last September, pairing its AI video generator with a new social-media app similar to TikTok. It briefly secured the top spot in Apple's App Store, but usage flatlined in the months that followed.

 

The company is now looking to integrate video-generation features into its main ChatGPT app.

 

Meanwhile, Anthropic solidified its lead in the fast-growing coding segment, upgrading Claude Code with a more advanced version of its AI model last fall. Many coders spent their holiday breaks on a so-called "Claude bender," testing out the product's capabilities, and it has become the tool of choice for the legions of software engineers working inside tech companies.

 

Altman brought on Simo last August to serve as the company's chief of applications, a wide-ranging role where she oversees everything from product to finance. Simo has pushed the company to more tightly integrate its research and product teams, and intends to unify the company's longer-term bets, including its hardware device, around improving productivity for users.

 

In coding, OpenAI regained some ground after releasing a new version of its Codex app last month, as well as an updated model called GPT 5.4, which is tailored to professional work. Simo recently tweeted on X that Codex now has more than two million weekly active users, up nearly four times since the start of the year.

 

The company has sought to deploy engineers with consulting firms and business partners, an effort to accelerate AI adoption throughout many industries. Business usage of AI is a core facet of the AI boom as OpenAI and others seek to finance continued expansions.

 

OpenAI is also benefiting from its continued dominance in the consumer market and from the Pentagon's decision to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk, which has made some businesses more hesitant to buy its technology. Anthropic is suing the U.S. government over the decision.

 

"We are very much acting as if it's a code red," Simo told staff in the all-hands. "I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense."” [1]

 

1. OpenAI to Pare Side Projects To Focus on Its Core Business --- AI pioneer plans to emphasize coding, enterprise work amid pressure from rivals. Berber, Jin.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Mar 2026: A1.