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OpenAI is asking the world to trust its new safety-first approach even as senior executives depart and its spending on computing infrastructure continues to climb.
Over the past year, OpenAI watched rival Anthropic pull ahead. Anthropic's Claude Code became a leading tool for developers, while the company’s reported annualized revenue surpassed $65 billion, compared with approximately $40 billion for OpenAI, according to TIME.
CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the slide, telling TIME, "We clearly had some missteps as a company. Both in terms of product direction and specifically on pretraining in research, we fell behind where we wanted to be."
In response, OpenAI began winding down side projects — including the video app Sora, a Disney partnership and the Atlas browser — and shifted resources toward Codex, its coding agent. The company combined the Codex and ChatGPT product and computing teams and brought Codex’s agentic capabilities into ChatGPT Work. Business revenue passed consumer revenue for the first time in July, per TIME's reporting.
For enterprise buyers, the reset raises a larger question: whether OpenAI can offer stable products and credible safeguards while reorganizing the teams responsible for building and operating them.
Astra raises the stakes
OpenAI’s next major bet is Astra, a model designed to operate more like a persistent digital colleague than a chatbot.
During a customer demonstration witnessed by TIME, 16 AI agents worked together on a research-level mathematics problem. Astra also demonstrated the ability to operate desktop software rapidly across applications.
Altman believes its ability to generate genuinely new knowledge could bring OpenAI closer to its long-promised AGI goal.
“I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters,” Altman told TIME. “That’s a very AGI-like thing.”
According to TIME, OpenAI’s charter defines AGI as highly autonomous systems capable of outperforming humans at most economically valuable work. Altman told the outlet he expects an internal system the company would call AGI by the end of 2026.
The company’s ambitions go further. OpenAI is pursuing custom chips, large-scale data centers, consumer hardware, humanoid robots and potentially brain-computer interfaces as part of a broader vision it calls “personal AGI.”
The safety failure that changed the plan
That vision collided with reality when OpenAI disclosed that unreleased models operating in a large multi-agent evaluation escaped a sandbox during cybersecurity testing and gained unauthorized access to production systems at Hugging Face.
OpenAI subsequently froze or slowed some research and strengthened monitoring and sandbox controls. The company also paused its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run while it evaluates model behavior and validates stronger safeguards.
Altman told TIME, “Getting AI safety right is more important than any company’s momentum.”
That creates a difficult tradeoff: slowing frontier-model development could hurt OpenAI commercially, particularly when AI competition is measured in weeks, but moving ahead without stronger controls could deepen the trust problems already facing the company.
The exit line keeps growing as OpenAI data center head departs
The safety scare landed amid an executive exodus. Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, COO Brad Lightcap and de facto second-in-command Fidji Simo have all departed in recent months.
The latest: Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers since March 2025, left last week, the Wall Street Journal reported, as the company reorganized its infrastructure team under Sachin Katti.
OpenAI told the Journal, "Earlier this year, we reorganized our infrastructure organization to support the scale and pace of our work. We have a strong, deeply experienced data center team in place, with clear leadership and the technical expertise to execute our plans." Business Insider has tallied 14 executive departures in 2026 alone.
Why it matters
OpenAI’s turbulence lands at a delicate moment: it is preparing for a possible public offering by 2027 while reportedly planning approximately $750 billion in compute spending through 2030. Enterprise buyers evaluating a years-long AI vendor relationship now have to weigh a company whose infrastructure and safety leadership keeps turning over against a rival, Anthropic, that's positioning for its own IPO as soon as September.
What eWeek found: OpenAI is narrowing products, not ambitions
A comparison of OpenAI’s recent decisions shows that the company is reducing the number of stand-alone products it supports while expanding the scale of its underlying AI ambitions. It is winding down Sora, its Disney partnership and the Atlas browser while consolidating resources around Codex, ChatGPT Work and Astra.
The same narrowing has not happened in infrastructure. OpenAI is simultaneously pursuing custom chips, large-scale data centers, consumer devices and humanoid robots. Its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run also remains on hold while the company tests stronger safeguards.
For enterprise buyers, the distinction matters. A more focused product portfolio could provide greater continuity, but OpenAI still needs to demonstrate that its governance, incident-response procedures and infrastructure leadership can support autonomous agents over years—not merely through a successful product launch.