Pressured by Anthropic into Defense: OpenAI to Drastically Scale Back Non-Core Projects, Shift Focus to Coding and Business

According to 1M AI News monitoring, OpenAI's senior management is finalizing a major strategic shift, planning to refocus the company on two main areas: programming and enterprise users. Application Business CEO Fidji Simo previewed this change to employees at an all-hands meeting last week, stating that CEO Sam Altman and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen are assessing which businesses will be deprioritized, with specific adjustments expected to be communicated to employees in the coming weeks.

「We can't afford to miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,」 Simo said at the meeting. 「We need to truly excel in terms of productivity, especially on the enterprise side.」

Over the past year, OpenAI has aggressively launched a series of new products, including the video generation tool Sora, the browser Atlas, hardware devices in collaboration with Jony Ive, and ChatGPT e-commerce features. Altman had previously likened this approach to "betting on a series of startups within OpenAI," but this "do-everything-at-once" strategy has put the company in a reactive position.

The direct pressure for this strategic shift comes from Anthropic. Anthropic has established a leading position in the enterprise market with AI agent products that can autonomously perform complex tasks, such as Claude Code and Cowork, which also triggered a global stock market sell-off last month. In contrast, Anthropic's product line is much more streamlined than OpenAI's and has not ventured into the field of image and video generation to date.