“Code red” isn’t a one-off at OpenAI.
CEO Sam Altman said on an episode of the “Big Technology Podcast” published Thursday that the company has entered emergency mode multiple times in response to competitive threats — and expects to continue doing so as rivals close in.
“It’s good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges,” Altman said.
“My guess is we’ll be doing these once maybe twice a year for a long time, and that’s part of really just making sure that we win in our space,” he added.
Altman said that OpenAI had gone “code red” earlier this year when China’s DeepSeek emerged. DeepSeek shocked the tech industry in January when it said its AI model matches top competitors like ChatGPT’s o1 at a fraction of the cost.
OpenAI entered “code red” earlier this month, about two weeks after Google released its latest AI chatbot, Gemini 3. The model drew widespread praise after its release in November, with Google touting it as its most advanced model to date. Altman reportedly told staff in an internal Slack memo that OpenAI would prioritize ChatGPT while pushing back other product plans.
Altman said in the podcast episode that Google’s Gemini 3 did not have “the impact we were worried it might.”
“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,” he added.
Since OpenAI entered “code red,” the company has moved quickly to ship new upgrades and features.
Last week, it rolled out a more advanced AI model aimed at improving ChatGPT’s performance across professional work, coding, and scientific tasks. OpenAI also unveiled a new image-generation model earlier this week.
Altman said the company will not be in code red “that much longer.”
“Historically, these have been kind of like six- or eight-week things for us,” he added.
The state of “code red” has also been a precedent for other tech companies. In 2022, Google declared an internal “code red” after ChatGPT’s debut. The search giant was lagging in consumer AI, despite having funded much of the research that made the AI boom possible.
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