Altman Hits Code Red as Gemini 3 Peeks Through His Window Holding a “New Sheriff in Town” Sign

I’m pretty sure the last time Sam Altman was freaking out this much, he was ironically losing his job to the very AI company he built… for about 36 hours… before Microsoft rolled in like the world’s nerdiest Navy SEAL team and reinstated him. 

But this time? Sammie boy isn’t waiting for a coup. He’s yanking the Homeland Security lever himself and taping a giant, fluorescent CODE RED label on ChatGPT’s forehead.

According to an internal memo, OpenAI is entering something Sam calls a “surge” phase… which is a polite way of saying he feels the walls inching in. And he’s not wrong for being paranoid. Google and Anthropic aren’t playing around anymore. They’re cooking.

For instance, Google’s new Gemini 3 model is being hailed as the current GOAT and the numbers back it up… 650 million monthly active users, plus the 2 billion humans forced to consume AI Overviews every time they search “cheap plumber near me” or “Trump saying quiet piggy” (the man is entertaining, isn’t he?). Needless to say, Gemini is practically sitting in Sam’s parking spot in a stolen OpenAI hoodie like, “Yeah… I work here now.”

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

To make matters worse, Anthropics gone from “that wholesome AI safety start-up” to a full-blown enterprise menace. Claude Opus 4.5 just outscored GPT-5 in key benchmarks, and the company’s gone from <1,000 business customers to 300,000 in two years. Their large accounts (the ones dropping six figures or more) grew sevenfold.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is dealing with rising data-center costs, insane infrastructure commitments (over $1.4 TRILLION in recent deals alone), and the ongoing challenge of keeping top engineers who’d prefer not to work 20 hours a day making AGI while Sam tweets cryptic emojis at Elon.

So Sam grabbed the big red crayon and circled the only thing that matters for the next stretch… ChatGPT (shocker right?). He told employees the company is delaying all the fun side quests (shopping agents, health tools, advertising products) and anything that isn’t “Make ChatGPT Not Lose To Gemini.” 

Translation: “No one sleeps until personalization is better, speed is faster, reliability is higher, and we figure out what the hell users actually want to do with this thing (besides write AI erotica, which, let’s be honest, is still the number one use case).”

Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, even jumped on X to casually flex that “Search is ours for the taking.” Supposedly ChatGPT already handles 10% of all search activity… which is hard to believe, considering half the time I ask it something normal it replies like a Victorian orphan apologizing for speaking out of turn.

But the pressure is real. OpenAI still dominates with 800M weekly users (read that again, weekly) but Gemini is getting more engagement time. People are spending longer sessions chatting with Google’s model than ChatGPT. This isn’t Nvidia vs. Intel. This is more like Apple vs. Samsung (10 years ago)... the lead exists, but it ain’t comfy.

Sam warned months ago that the competitive pressure was about to spike. And wow, he undersold it. Within weeks of Gemini 3 launching, being universally praised, and outpacing GPT-5 in independent tests, Sam’s tone shifted from “Congrats Google, looks awesome!” to “Everyone stop what you’re doing and fix the damn chatbot.”

Remember, this all comes while OpenAI is scaling faster than any company in modern history. Their current annualized revenue run rate is over $20B… and they’re projecting hundreds of billions by 2030. Investors are staring at the $1.4T infrastructure bill like… “Bro, are you building AGI or solving world hunger and hairloss?”

(Source: Fortune)

Sam has been shrugging off the worries for months, acting like it’s completely reasonable for a start-up to spend sovereign-nation money on compute. But that only worked for so long. Now the tone has changed from “All good here” to “Everyone calm down, take your stress gummy, and ship faster.”

So yes… we’ve reached full code red. And wouldn’t you know it, this is usually when tech founders finally start acting like tech founders. At this pace, I’d pencil in the robot uprising for 2026 instead of 2030. Adjust your calendars accordingly.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Apple as mentioned in the article.