Sam Altman admits OpenAI has declared 'code red' multiple times this year to combat rising competitive threats from Google — "It's good to be paranoid."

At the beginning of this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” to enhance ChatGPT's quality following the successful launch and emergence of Google's Gemini 3 model. The AI firm was forced to delay other products, like advertising and AI agents, to deal with the situation.

Consequently, OpenAI launched GPT-5.2 as a response to Gemini 3's threat to ChatGPT, which ships with a plethora of advanced capabilities across coding, video, and images. The company also recently shipped a new upgrade for ChatGPT images, making it 4x faster, more precise, and more creative.

Altman indicated that Google's Gemini 3 launch had a lesser impact on ChatGPT's metrics than previously thought, further revealing that OpenAI might be eyeing a January exit from 'code red' — "Historically, these have been kind of like six- or eight-week things for us," Altman indicated.

The executive revealed that this wasn't the first time the company has entered emergency mode; it has actually declared code red multiple times as a response to competitive threats in the ever-evolving industry during an episode of the Big Technology Podcast (via Bloomberg).

The executive revealed that the company went into code red at the beginning of this year following the emergence of China's DeepSeek, which surpassed proprietary AI models like OpenAI's o3 model across a wide range of benchmarks at a fraction of the development cost.

While the OpenAI CEO indicated that Gemini 3 didn't have the impact they were intiially worried about, "but it did — in the same way that Deepseek did — identify some weaknesses in our product offering strategy, and we're addressing those very quickly".

Do you think OpenAI is under any real threat from its competitors? Let me know in the comments.

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