Amid growing competitive pressure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has informed both employees and investors that the company is maintaining strong momentum in its development.
According to an internal Slack message seen by the media, Altman told OpenAI employees last Friday that the company’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has “reached a monthly growth rate of over 10% once again.” He also mentioned that OpenAI is preparing to launch an “upgraded chatbot model” this week.
Currently, ChatGPT has surpassed 800 million weekly users, but Google(GOOGL) and Anthropic are steadily eating into its market share. In December last year, OpenAI announced that it had entered a “Code Red” state to make comprehensive improvements to ChatGPT, temporarily putting several projects on hold and concentrating resources on this goal.
In Friday’s internal communication, Altman also mentioned that OpenAI’s programming product Codex had seen a growth of about 50% over the past week.
Codex competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has gained a large number of users over the past year.
Last week, OpenAI released a new Codex model—GPT-5.3-Codex—and launched a standalone app for users with Apple computers. According to internal messages, Altman described the growth of Codex as “absolutely crazy.”
“It’s been an amazing week,” Altman wrote.
Investor Messaging
Insiders revealed that as OpenAI approaches completing a financing round that could reach up to $100 billion, Altman and CFO Sarah Friar have been actively pitching the company’s growth story to investors.
In private discussions, the two executives emphasized OpenAI’s advantages in the consumer sector, the expanding enterprise business, and its access to computing resources.
As part of the fundraising discussions, OpenAI presented investors with several charts. According to internal data, Codex is steadily capturing market share from Claude Code.
Insiders said that OpenAI expects the fundraising negotiations to intensify over the next two weeks.
As previously reported, OpenAI’s financing round may occur in two phases. The first phase could involve funding from Microsoft(MSFT), NVIDIA(NVDA), and Amazon(AMZN), with Amazon discussing a potential $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Following this, additional investments from entities like SoftBank could come into play, with SoftBank reportedly considering a $30 billion investment.
However, the specific details of this financing round are still in flux, and the final structure may change.
Ad Testing Launched
On Monday, OpenAI announced the launch of an ad test for ChatGPT in the United States, available to certain free and Go plan subscribers.
OpenAI stated that these ads will be clearly labeled and will appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s responses without affecting the content of the answers.
The digital advertising market has long been dominated by Google and Meta, with Amazon gradually becoming an important player in recent years.
It is reported that OpenAI expects that, in the long term, ad revenue will account for less than half of its overall earnings.