Red alert on OpenAI continues but may end by January as battle with Google intensifies
OpenAI has announced a company-wide code red following Google’s introduction of Gemini 3, accelerating development and resource shifts. The company is expecting to finish this phase by January 2025.
OpenAI’s current policy remains all hands on deck. Or rather the reports. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is currently under red alert. This is an unofficial but de facto internal state of urgency and quick execution announced by CEO Sam Altman earlier this month. The alert comes as OpenAI finds itself under intense competitive pressure, especially following the launch of the Gemini 3 model by Google, which is gaining serious momentum among both individual users and businesses.
The rapid rise of Gemini 3 put OpenAI on the defensive, especially when Google’s AI models were seen outperforming OpenAI’s systems on several key benchmarks. This raised concerns about ChatGPT’s perception, adoption, and short-term business impact. So in response, Altman announced a red alert internally, instructing staff to act swiftly and decisively on the upcoming release.
“We announced this Code Red to really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in a particular area, and it’s really a way to define priorities and define things that can be de-prioritized,” said Fidzi Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI (via CNBC ). During this period, Simo said OpenAI has increased resources focused on ChatGPT in general, which helped lead to the release of this model, but stressed that that’s not why it’s coming out specifically this week.
While the urgency at OpenAI headquarters was tied to the capabilities of Google’s new model, Altman however rejected this, saying that the situation was not solely driven by Google’s Gemini 3 launch and that the model’s release had less impact on OpenAI’s metrics than initially feared. He told CNBC that “I believe that when there is a competitive threat, you want to focus on it and deal with it quickly,” Altman said. He also told the publication that the Code Red status is likely to expire by January.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.2
Following the red alert, OpenAI quickly launched its new model GPT-5.2, which was unveiled last week. It is ranked as the company’s most powerful AI model to date for everyday professional use. The company says this model brings meaningful improvements to the tasks users rely on daily, including creating spreadsheets, presentations, writing and debugging code, interpreting images, and handling long and complex references.
However, Red Alert is not just about a single model launch. In the coming weeks, OpenAI reportedly plans to focus strictly on ChatGPT, improving performance, massively improving reliability, and speeding up iterations. Internally, the company is reallocating engineers, researchers and computing resources to work on AI models, while slowing or sidelining projects that aren’t directly tied to strengthening the core product.
