December

4 events

Editors' summary

Anthropic makes its first acquisition, OpenAI declares a code red

On 2 December, Anthropic acquired Bun, the JavaScript runtime — its first acquisition, for an undisclosed sum. Claude Code ships as a Bun executable, so the purchase brought in the team behind a foundation its main product depends on. Bun would continue as open source.

Anthropic also disclosed that Claude Code had reached a $1 billion annual run rate six months after general availability, putting a number on writing code as a business.

On the 1st, Sam Altman was reported to have declared a "code red" in an internal memo, moving people onto ChatGPT and pushing back advertising, shopping and health agents, and Pulse. Gemini 3, out the month before, had gone ahead on the benchmarks. GPT-5.2 followed on the 11th — the reasoning model the memo had trailed, priced at 1.4 times GPT-5.1. The phrase Google reached for three years earlier had come back the other way.

On the 15th, Merriam-Webster named "slop" — low-quality content mass-produced with generative AI — its word of the year, a choice Macquarie Dictionary and The Economist echoed. The dictionaries put a word to a year of AI output flooding the web.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record4 events

1
BusinessReportedOpenAI / Sam Altman
OpenAI reported to declare a "code red" over ChatGPT
The Wall Street Journal and The Information reported the following day that Sam Altman had declared a "code red" in an internal memo, directing resources toward improving ChatGPT. The memo put the day-to-day experience first — the range of questions the chatbot can answer, speed, reliability, personalization — and to make room for that, work on advertising in ChatGPT, on shopping and health agents, and on the Pulse personal assistant was to be pushed back. Altman encouraged temporary transfers from other teams and set a daily call for everyone working on the effort. Behind it was Gemini 3, released on 18 November, which surpassed OpenAI's models on industry benchmarks; Google said Gemini's monthly users had grown from 450 million in July to 650 million in October, against 800 million weekly users for ChatGPT. The memo said OpenAI was "at a critical time for ChatGPT" and that a new reasoning model due the following week beat Gemini 3 in internal evaluations. The phrase was the one Google itself had used in December 2022 when facing ChatGPT, turned around three years later.
2
BusinessAnthropic / Jarred Sumner / Mike Krieger / Bun
Anthropic's first acquisition: Bun, as Claude Code hits $1B run-rate
Anthropic acquired Bun, the JavaScript runtime — its first acquisition, on undisclosed terms. Bun bundles a runtime, package manager, bundler, and test runner into one toolkit; founded by Jarred Sumner in 2021, it had over seven million monthly downloads and more than 82,000 GitHub stars. Claude Code ships as a Bun executable, so Anthropic was taking in the team behind infrastructure its flagship product depends on. The announcement also disclosed that Claude Code had reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue six months after its May 2025 general availability. Anthropic said Bun would remain open source under the MIT license and that it would keep investing in it as a tool for all developers.
11
ModelOpenAI
GPT-5.2 ships ten days after the "code red"
OpenAI released GPT-5.2. In ChatGPT it appears as instant and thinking modes plus a top-end GPT-5.2 Pro, while the API offers GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2 Pro; a coding-focused GPT-5.2-Codex shipped alongside. The context window is 400,000 tokens with up to 128,000 tokens of output, and the knowledge cutoff moved to 31 August 2025, nearly a year on from GPT-5.1's 30 September 2024. API pricing is $1.75 per million input tokens and $14 per million output, 1.4 times GPT-5.1 ($21 and $168 for Pro). It scored 70.9% on GDPval, which measures realistic knowledge work, against 38.8% for GPT-5; 52.9% on the abstract-reasoning ARC-AGI-2 and 100% on the AIME 2025 competition maths set, against 17.6% and 94.0% for GPT-5.1 Thinking. Responses containing an error were, OpenAI said, 30% less common in relative terms than with GPT-5.1 Thinking. This was the model Altman's 1 December internal memo had referred to when it said a new reasoning model due the following week beat Gemini 3 in internal evaluations.
15
CultureMerriam-Webster
"Slop" is named word of the year
Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year, in the sense of low-quality content mass-produced with generative AI. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary and The Economist picked "AI slop" as their words of the year the same season. The usage spread through English-speaking circles from around 2024 and is generally credited to the developer Simon Willison; in May 2024 the Guardian had introduced it as the word that follows "spam" and "junk". Fake news, mass-produced videos, articles that merely look plausible — the year settled on a shared word for a web filling up with generative AI output. Japanese adopted the term as-is, as "AIスロップ".

↑ 2025

OpenAI reported to declare a "code red" over ChatGPT

Anthropic's first acquisition: Bun, as Claude Code hits $1B run-rate

GPT-5.2 ships ten days after the "code red"

"Slop" is named word of the year