OpenAI boss Sam Altman declares ‘code red’ over ChatGPT

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has declared a "code red" situation at the AI startup amid increased competition to ChatGPT, according to reports.

In an internal memo, seen by The Information and The Wall Street Journal, Mr Altman told employees that ChatGPT’s quality needed to improve in order to keep pace with rivals like Google Gemini.

Google released the latest version of its AI model last month, with Gemini 3 surpassing ChatGPT in a range of benchmark tests.

The tech giant said it represented a "new era of intelligence" after it set a new record score on Humanity’s Last Exam – a test created by AI safety researchers to identify artificial superintelligence.

Gemini 3 also drew widespread praise for its Nano Banana image generator, as well as its deep reasoning abilities.

"I’ve used ChatGPT every day for three years. Just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Mr Altman publicly congratulated Google shortly after its release, calling it a "great model" in a post to X.

Privately, he reportedly told employees that ChatGPT had fallen behind Google, writing, "We know we have some work to do, but we are catching up fast".

OpenAI has not commented on the leaked memo. The Independent has reached out to the company for more information.

ChatGPT head Nick Turley indirectly addressed the increased competition in the AI chatbot space in a series of posts to X on Monday, noting that OpenAI’s product remained the "number one AI assistant worldwide".

He wrote: "New products are launching every week, which is great – it pushes us to move faster and keep raising the bar for what an AI assistant can do.

"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."

OpenAI is also holding back on introducing ads to ChatGPT, according to the memo, which it is currently testing in beta versions of the app.