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.
OpenAI reported to declare a "code red" over ChatGPT
The memo itself was never published; this rests on The Wall Street Journal, which said it had viewed the document, and on The Information's reporting the same day. OpenAI did not confirm it officially. The Journal wrote that Altman told employees "Monday", which is 1 December 2025. The areas to improve, the deferred projects, the temporary transfers, the daily call, and Gemini's user numbers come from the Journal; ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users from CNBC; the quotation from the memo and the "economic headwinds" remark from Fortune; the claim about the following week's model from The Information and outlets following it. The company's subsequent actions, including the release of GPT-5.2 the following week, were consistent with the reporting.