Sam Altman reveals why OpenAI declared ‘Code Red’: Is Google still a threat?

Sam Altman in a recent interview has talked about “code red” at OpenAI and the growing dominance of Google in the landscape of artificial intelligence.

While speaking on the Big Technology Podcast with Alex Kantrowitz, OpenAI’s CEO called Google “a huge threat.”

Altman said, “I think Google is still a huge threat, you know, an extremely powerful company. If Google had really decided to take OpenAI seriously in 2023, we would have been in a really bad place. Google could have smashed us.”

“But their AI effort at that time was not going in the quite right direction. Product-wise they didn’t have their code red at one point, they did not take it seriously,” he added.

Altman also stated that Google has one of the strongest business models in the tech industry. He also shed light on how bolting AI onto search or messaging is worse than redesigning products for an AI-first world.

While talking about “code red”, Sam Altman said, “code reds are actually quite common for the company. I think that it's good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges.”

“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,” the 40-year-old CEO added.

Earlier this month, Sam Altman declared code red at the company in a bid to overhaul ChatGPT and improve the quality of the chatbot.

Under the code red, Altman also announced plans to delay other planned initiatives, including the integration of AI-powered shopping tools, ads, and personal assistant ChatGPT Pulse.

The decision came when Google’s Gemini 3 AI model surpassed the popularity of ChatGPT. As per Google, the active users grew from 450 million in July to 650 million in October.