ChatGPT maker OpenAI shifts its focus to business users amid Anthropic
pressure
[April 16, 2026] By
MATT O'BRIEN
The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s chief financial officer
Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is
also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her
emails and Slack messages.
Friar and other company executives are banking OpenAI's future on more
of the latter as it shifts its focus to business-oriented products while
shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability.
OpenAI says it will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for
“high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened
competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to
adopt AI assistants in their workplaces.
“You’ll see a new model coming from us in short order. We feel very
excited about it,” Friar said in an interview with The Associated Press.
OpenAI boasts of more than 900 million weekly users of its core ChatGPT
product, and Friar said about 95% of them “don't pay anything” for the
popular chatbot. But while all those interactions build habits and
reliance, they also strain the costly computing resources needed to
power the company's AI systems and highlight the need for big business
customers to help pay the bills.
OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion,
both lose more money than they make, putting the privately-owned San
Francisco-based AI research laboratories in a fierce competition to
generate more revenue as they race toward becoming publicly traded on
Wall Street.
A push to improve performance and sales of OpenAI's business-oriented
products — already Anthropic's bread and butter — has driven OpenAI to
abandon some consumer initiatives, like the AI video generator app Sora.
“I think it was a little heartbreaking, but we’re like, OK, it’s not the
main event right now," Friar said. "We need to make sure that our new
model that’s coming has enough compute.”
Codenamed Spud, OpenAI says its “smartest model yet” offers “stronger
reasoning, better understanding of intent and dependencies, better
follow-through and more reliable output in production.” It's part of
OpenAI's answer to Anthropic's new Claude Mythos, which Anthropic claims
is so “strikingly capable” that it is limiting its use to select
customers because of its apparent ability to surpass human cybersecurity
experts in finding or exploiting computer vulnerabilities.
Friar, the former CEO of neighborhood social platform Nextdoor, said
business customers accounted for about 20% of OpenAI’s revenue when she
was hired in 2024 as chief financial officer. She said it’s now 40% and
expected to account for half of OpenAI’s sales by the end of the year.
It's a sharp turnaround from late last year, when OpenAI co-founder and
CEO Sam Altman was promoting a now-shuttered Sora partnership with
Disney, launching a plan to sell ads on ChatGPT and floating the idea of
letting ChatGPT engage in erotica with paid adult users.
Altman said on the “Mostly Human” podcast earlier this month that a
sharper focus was needed — and Friar agrees.
“Tech companies, when they’re growing, it’s just this natural thing that
happens. There’s so many cool things you could do,” she said, adding
that companies can end up doing “really badly” if they do too many
things, while "great companies are very good at, in a reasonable period
of time, kind of doing that winnowing down and refocusing and it’s super
painful.”
Signaling that shift was the hiring three months ago of Slack CEO Denise
Dresser to be OpenAI's first chief revenue officer.
Dresser said in a recent AP interview that she has been laser-focused on
meeting with corporate leaders and positioning OpenAI as the go-to
platform for workplaces employing AI agents to automate a variety of
computer-based job tasks.
[to top of second column] |
The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone with an image on a
computer monitor generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model,
Friday, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
 “It’s really clear to me that
companies are past the experimentation phase and they’re into using
AI to do real work,” Dresser said. “Leaders at companies are
recognizing that AI is probably the most consequential shift of
their lifetime.”
But those leaders also have a choice, namely
Anthropic's Claude that has become widely used by software
professionals. Founded in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI leaders who
said they wanted to prioritize AI safety, Anthropic has positioned
itself as the more responsible AI vendor. The distinction drew
attention when President Donald Trump's administration punished the
startup after a contract dispute over AI use in the military, and
Altman used the opportunity to cement OpenAI's own deal with the
Pentagon.
Consumer interest in Anthropic surged and the company said its
annualized revenues hit $30 billion, a higher number than what
OpenAI has reported, though they measure it differently. Friar and
Dresser declined to reveal OpenAI's latest sales but both have
suggested that Anthropic's number is inflated because it doesn't
account for revenue it must share with cloud computing providers
Amazon and Google.
Even so, it remains a tight competition that's also tied to the
health of the stock market and the future of the economy.
“They’re likely quite close,” said Luke Emberson, a researcher at
nonprofit institute Epoch AI. "Certainly the trends show Anthropic
is growing much faster than OpenAI. If that continues, they’re
likely to cross soon.”
The urgency led Dresser to send a memo to OpenAI employees on
Sunday, first reported by The Verge, that asserted that Anthropic's
coding focus “gave them an early wedge” but expressing confidence
that OpenAI has the “real structural advantage” as AI usage expands
beyond software developers and OpenAI builds enough computing
capacity to operate its AI systems.
“Their story is built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a
small group of elites should control AI," Dresser's memo said of
Anthropic. “Our positive message will win over time: build powerful
systems, put in the right safeguards, expand access, and help people
do more.”
But for skeptics of the financial viability of AI products like
ChatGPT and Claude, the trajectory of both money-losing companies is
alarming as smaller startups increasingly become dependent on their
AI tools. Anthropic has already imposed rate limits on heavy users,
forcing some to wait for hours to use Claude, and both companies
have set up service tiers that reward premium payers, said author
and AI critic Ed Zitron.
“It’s what I call the subprime AI crisis,” Zitron said. “People
built their lives and they built their businesses on top of these
companies that, as they try and save money, will start turning the
screws.”
One thing that both AI leaders and critics agree on is that it is an
expensive technology, though whether it is worth the cost in
electricity-hungry AI computers remains to be seen.
“People will say, well, ‘Once they go public, they’re safe.’ That’s
not true,” Zitron said. “Public companies can and will die,
especially ones that are dependent on $100 billion to $200 billion
every year or so, just to keep breathing.”
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
