Katherine Li, West Coast breaking news reporter at the Business Insider.

Anthropic and OpenAI release dueling AI models on the same day in an escalating rivalry

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The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic intensified this week.

The two companies released dueling new AI models on Thursday and had back-to-back podcast appearances on “TBPN.”

On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model that the company says would improve performance on office productivity and coding tasks, with an expanded “context window” that allows it to work through longer documents and more complex projects in a single session.

Meanwhile, OpenAI punched back with its own new coding-focused model called GPT-5.3-Codex, which the company says runs faster, uses fewer computing resources, and can generate and manage complex software from English instructions. The new version also comes alongside a stand-alone Codex desktop app.

Both Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, and Sholto Douglas, one of Anthropic’s leading researchers, appeared on the “TBPN” podcast in back-to-back chats with show host John Coogan and Jordi Hays.

“I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they’re managing a team of agents,” said Altman. “And as the agents get better, they’ll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction.”

Douglas, who appeared in the subsequent timeslot, told Coogan and Hays that users have been comparing previous Anthropic and OpenAI models, and they have noticed some key differences.

“The OpenAI models were a bit better at trying really, really, really hard on tough problems, but the Anthropic models were much faster and so forth,” Douglas said.

“And so they worked on speed while we worked on making the models much, much better at really, really tough problems,” Douglas added of the Opus 4.6.

The latest release is part of a long-running competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, dating back to 2021, when a group of OpenAI researchers left to form Anthropic, aiming to develop safer and more controlled AI systems.

A big week for Anthropic

This week, Anthropic’s launch of industry-specific plugins triggered a stock market sell-off as Wall Street worried about AI’s impact on software.

Anthropic also took a subtle shot at OpenAI with a series of ads released this week, including one that will air during the Super Bowl.

The ads feature unnamed humanized AIs dropping ads in the middle of their advice, alongside the promise that its model, Claude, will remain ad-free.

OpenAI announced in January that ads are coming to ChatGPT for users of the free version.

Altman subsequently hit back, calling Anthropic “dishonest” and defending ChatGPT as a product that brings AI “to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.” He also clarified that the ads will be “clearly labeled” to differentiate themselves from the chatbot’s answers to queries.

“We are not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product,” Altman told the “TBPN” podcast on Thursday.

“Our first principle with ads is that we’re not going to put stuff into the LLM stream,” Altman added. “That would feel crazy dystopic, like a bad sci-fi movie.”




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

Jensen Huang says Nvidia would love to back an OpenAI IPO, and there’s ‘no drama’ with Sam Altman

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Jensen Huang says Nvidia would love to invest in a future OpenAI IPO.

Huang said in an interview on CNBC’s “Mad Money” on Tuesday that there was “no drama” between Nvidia and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, pushing back against recent chatter of tension in the relationship between the two companies.

“The first deal is on,” the Nvidia CEO said, referring to the company’s September deal with OpenAI, under which the company said it planned to invest up to $100 billion in the AI startup.

“​​And then there’s, of course, an IPO in the future,” he added. “We love to be participating in that as well,” he added.

Huang also described OpenAI as a “once in a generation company” and said Nvidia is “delighted to invest in it.”

His comments come amid reports suggesting internal unease around the deal.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the investment had sparked internal concerns at Nvidia, with some executives questioning the deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Separately, Reuters reported on Tuesday that OpenAI had been unhappy with certain newer Nvidia chips and had looked at alternatives since last year, citing people familiar with the matter.

Huang told reporters in Taipei on Saturday that speculation of any dissatisfaction with OpenAI was “nonsense.”

“We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made,” he added.

Altman has also pushed back on rumors of tension.

“We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world,” wrote Altman in a post on X on Tuesday.

“We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from,” he added.

OpenAI is one of the world’s most valuable private AI companies and a major customer for Nvidia’s chips, which power the training and deployment of large language models.

The startup has not announced plans for an IPO, but its fundraising and computing needs have fueled speculation about how it will finance future growth.

“Big Short” investor Michael Burry said in a Substack exchange in January that he was surprised that ChatGPT “kicked off a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure race.”

“It’s like someone built a prototype robot and every business in the world started investing for a robot future,” he wrote.




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Microsoft says OpenAI is driving 45% of the backlog for Azure cloud computing

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Microsoft is facing capacity constraints, and OpenAI is driving a large portion of the backlog in its cloud computing business.

The company said its backlog in commercial bookings, a metric referred to as remaining performance obligations, ballooned 110% year over year to $625 billion when it reported earnings for the second quarter on Wednesday.

OpenAI accounts for roughly 45% of those commitments, Microsoft revealed. The company did not say how much OpenAI contributed during the previous quarter.

Some Wall Street analysts on the call expressed concerns about Microsoft’s dependency on OpenAI.

CEO Satya Nadella said acquiring more Azure clients is important to the tech giant, but it can’t come at the expense of neglecting its other services.

“If you think about it, acquiring an Azure customer is super important to us, but so is acquiring an M365 or a GitHub or a Dragon Copilot, which are all, by the way, incremental businesses and TAMs for us,” Nadella said during Microsoft’s second-quarter earnings call. “And so we don’t want to maximize just one business of ours.”

Shares of Microsoft fell more than 6% in after-market trading on Wednesday, even as the tech giant posted an overall earnings beat.

Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss said during the call that some on Wall Street may be spooked by slower growth in overall Azure revenue and the increase in capex spending. Microsoft’s capital expenditures rose 66% year over year to $37.5 billion in the second quarter, another record for the company and testament to the sheer amount of money tech companies are spending amid the AI race.

CFO Amy Hood said that Microsoft has to look at many different areas when it allocates the GPUs and CPUs that come online as a result of its capex spending, including investing in the growth of first-party apps like Microsoft Copilot, devoting GPUs to research and development, and the talent they’ve acquired.

“You end up with the remainder going towards serving the Azure capacity that continues to grow in terms of demand,” she said.

Microsoft is not alone in facing capacity issues.

Executives at OpenAI, which has pledged to spend $250 billion on Azure services, have repeatedly said the startup is held back by a lack of compute, forcing tough trade-offs between product and research.

Wednesday’s earnings mark the first quarter since OpenAI completed its restructuring, which included a new agreement with Microsoft, the startup’s largest investor. Microsoft owns 27% of the public benefit corporation.

“It’s a great partnership,” Hood said of Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. It’s allowed us to remain a leader in terms of what we’re building and being on the cutting edge of app innovation.”




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Sam Altman.

Sam Altman said OpenAI was planning to ‘dramatically slow down’ its pace of hiring

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Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images

  • Sam Altman said that AI would “dramatically slow down” how quickly OpenAI hires.
  • Altman said the company will “hire more slowly but keep hiring.”
  • Altman’s comments came after a year when job growth stalled and hit young job seekers hard.

Sam Altman is addressing AI’s impact on the workforce, including on OpenAI’s hiring practices.

During a live-streamed town hall event on Monday, catered mainly toward developers, the OpenAI CEO said that AI has changed how quickly the company expands its head count, but the company is not in a hiring freeze and is nowhere close to doing away with human employees entirely.

“We are planning to dramatically slow down how quickly we grow because we think we’ll be able to do so much more with fewer people,” said Altman in response to a participant who asked if AI has changed OpenAI’s interview process of potential candidates.

“What I think we shouldn’t do, and what I hope other companies won’t do either, is hire super aggressively, then realize all of a sudden AI can do a lot of stuff, and you need fewer people, and have to have some sort of very uncomfortable conversation,” Altman added. “So I think the right approach for us will be to hire more slowly but keep hiring.”

Altman’s comments come amid the “Great Freeze” and concerns that job creation in America has lost momentum. The unemployment rate in November 2025 climbed to its highest level since 2021, while job openings have fallen 37% from their peak in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Business Insider previously reported that, while in 2022 there were roughly two job openings for every unemployed worker, by September 2025 that ratio had fallen to one. Workers who have been jobless for at least 27 weeks also now make up about a quarter of all unemployed Americans.

Based on data from the US Census Bureau, young workers have been hit especially hard by the hiring slowdown. The unemployment rate for Americans ages 20 to 24 reached 9.2% in August and September, the highest level since the recovery from the pandemic recession.




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OpenAI could generate $25 billion in annual ad revenue by 2030, and that should worry Google, top tech analyst says

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Advertising could become a $25 billion business for OpenAI — and pose a threat to Google, according to new estimates on Monday from a top tech analyst.

Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney sees the startup generating that level of annual ad revenue by 2030 if it executes well on rolling out this new business.

OpenAI said on Friday that free and Go users of ChatGPT would start seeing ads “in the coming weeks.” OpenAI also laid out its advertising principles, such as clearly labeling them and not sharing user conversations with advertisers.

“A path to generating several billion dollars in ad revenue in 2026, going to $25B+ by 2030, seems reasonable,” Mahaney wrote in a note to investors.

That’s based on the likely scale of ChatGPT by that time, the proven monetization of high-intent performance marketing platforms, and the current size of this market, the analyst added.

OpenAI’s revenue is growing fast already. CFO Sarah Friar said in a recent blog post that the startup’s annualized revenue topped $20 billion in 2025, up from $2 billion in 2023. However, there are big question marks over OpenAI’s losses and whether it can become profitable in the future.

Advertising could be one way for OpenAI to boost its top and bottom lines.

Mahaney noted that Google’s Search and YouTube businesses likely generated close to $300 billion in ad revenue in 2025, with Meta generating an additional $180 billion. These are highly profitable operations, with operating profit margins of 40%, according to the analyst.

ChatGPT has almost 1 billion weekly average users, many of whom share valuable details with the chatbot, such as what they want and need. Advertisers are willing to pay up for access to this treasure trove. This is the type of intent-based information that forms the backbone of the massive digital ad businesses run by Google and Meta.

OpenAI has said that initial test ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers and be relevant to the user’s conversation with the chatbot. That approach might not be too intrusive for users, while still being attractive to advertisers, Mahaney said.

“OpenAI’s move directly challenges this core revenue stream by offering an alternative, highly engaging platform for users to discover products and services,” Mahaney wrote. “If ChatGPT can successfully integrate ads that are helpful rather than intrusive, it could siphon off valuable commercial queries that traditionally go to Google.”

The analyst also warned that if OpenAI can develop a “conversational” ad format, where users research and discuss potential purchases within ChatGPT, that could prompt advertisers to shift some of their marketing budgets because this is “high-intent engagement.”

Even if ChatGPT goes all-in on ads, though, don’t expect the chatbot to take Google’s share of the market overnight, Mahaney added.

OpenAI will still have to compete with the tech ecosystem that Google has spent years creating, such as its Chrome web browser, as well as web users’ habit of Googling stuff when they need an answer, Mahaney wrote.




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OpenAI will focus on ‘practical adoption’ of AI in 2026, CFO says

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OpenAI is going on all in on “practical adoption” of artificial intelligence in 2026, according to its CFO.

“The priority is closing the gap between what AI now makes possible and how people, companies, and countries are using it day to day,” Sarah Friar wrote in a recent blog post.

“The opportunity is large and immediate, especially in health, science, and enterprise, where better intelligence translates directly into better outcomes,” she added.

There are signs the startup is already taking advantage of these opportunities. Data from Ramp showed that business spending on OpenAI models surged to a record in December, outpacing rivals Anthropic and Google.

Still, some investors and analysts are concerned about OpenAI’s huge financial commitments and whether the startup will generate enough revenue to make a profit in future years. For example, OpenAI has announced roughly $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals, such as data centers, in the past year or so.

One potential source of new revenue is advertising, something that OpenAI said on Friday it would start testing. CEO Sam Altman once labeled ads a “last resort,” although the move has been expected for months now.

Friar addressed concern about OpenAI’s finances in her recent blog, noting that revenue has grown in sync with compute availability.

OpenAI’s compute expanded from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to about 1.9 GW last year. Meanwhile, annualized revenue grew from $2 billion to more than $20 billion in the same period, Friar disclosed.

That represents “never-before-seen growth at such scale,” Friar wrote. “And we firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization,” she added.

This did little to quell the critics.

On Monday, tech blogger Paul Kedrosky reacted to Friar’s blog post by saying: “Amusing reading from OpenAI CFO bragging that they are successfully selling dollars for $0.70 in huge volume.”




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OpenAI is turning to the court of public opinion in its battle with Elon Musk

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OpenAI is turning to the court of public opinion as it wages a legal battle with Elon Musk.

While Musk and OpenAI prepare to head to a high-stakes jury trial in April, the two are duking it out online over what exactly happened when Musk split ways with the AI startup he helped cofound.

Musk has been using recently unsealed court documents to attack his rival in posts on his social media platform, X. On Friday, OpenAI published a blog titled “The truth Elon left out.”

The blog, which provided commentary alongside excerpts from several court documents, alleges that Musk wanted “full control” of OpenAI, “since he’d been burned by not having it in the past,” and that OpenAI’s leadership was surprised when Musk suggested having his kids control AGI or artificial general intelligence during conversations about succession planning.

The statements are aimed at the heart of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

Musk is suing OpenAI’s key leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, over allegations that the AI company misled him by shifting away from its core mission to remain a nonprofit. Musk said he donated $38 million to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit.

The startup, since its 2015 founding, operated as a nonprofit-controlled organization with a for-profit operating arm. It completed its transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation in October 2025.

Representatives for Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Last Tuesday, more than 100 documents related to the suit were unsealed, including diary entries from Brockman, which were obtained during the discovery process.

In one of the entries that was highlighted, Brockman appeared to write about his misgivings about pushing Musk out of OpenAI and committing to a nonprofit-only entity.

“Cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit,” the entry from the court documents said. “Don’t want to say that we’re committed. If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”

It was Brockman’s diary entries that US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cited in a recent ruling, in which she determined Musk had enough evidence that he’d been misled to take the case to trial.




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An OpenAI researcher turned venture capitalist says investors are 3 to 5 years behind the latest AI studies

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There is a yearslong lag in the AI hype cycle, according to one former AI researcher turned venture capitalist.

Jenny Xiao, who cofounded Leonis Capital in 2021 after a stint at OpenAI, said the current investment excitement around AI is far behind the actual research.

“There is a massive disconnect between what researchers are seeing and what investors are seeing,” Xiao said on the Fortune Magazine podcast this week.

What’s being discussed at the biggest AI conferences is as much as 3 to 5 years behind what researchers are thinking about, Xiao said.

“We are so behind the technical frontier, and that’s the gap I really want to bridge,” she added.

Xiao, who dropped out of a Ph.D. program in economics and AI to take a researcher role at OpenAI, founded Leonis Capital to bridge the worlds of venture capital and deep academic AI research.

“With AI, there needs to be a new generation of founders. There needs to be a new generation of VCs,” she said.

It’s also the first time investors need to be able to provide financial support to both the market and the technology, she added. Unlike SaaS companies, which were built on a “stable tech stack,” AI is moving fast. To keep up, Xiao said investors are going to need to be as technical as the founders.

If she has one piece of advice for investors who haven’t gone deep into the technical side, it’s that they should know “AI progress isn’t linear,” she said.

They should know AI progress happens in “lumps,” she said. So, questions about why AI progress is slowing down or speeding up aren’t the best way to characterize the rate of development.

“It’s neither of those two extremes,” she said. “It’s somewhere in between.”

Leonis Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.




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‘This case is going to trial’: Judge rejects Sam Altman’s efforts to toss Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit

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It looks like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are headed for a courtroom showdown.

During a hearing on Wednesday, a California judge said she plans to reject Altman’s lawyers’ last-ditch efforts to end Musk’s case against OpenAI and its CEO.

“This case is going to trial,” US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said at a hearing to consider whether the evidence was sufficient to warrant a jury trial.

“I think there’s plenty of evidence,” she said, referring to Musk’s case. “It’s circumstantial, but that’s how these things work.”

In his lawsuit filed in 2024, Musk accused OpenAI of misleading him in its decision to abandon its original nonprofit mission and structure in favor of a profit-oriented model, including through its partnership with Microsoft.

Musk says he donated $38 million to the maker of ChatGPT over the years to support its mission to develop AI for the benefit of humankind. The Tesla CEO is seeking monetary damages, as well as a judgment to void Microsoft’s licensing agreement with OpenAI.

At a hearing on Wednesday, an Oakland federal court judge said she felt there was enough evidence that Musk may have been deceived to allow the case to move forward to a jury. A trial is scheduled for March.

“There were assurances made, and promises made, that the structure would be maintained,” she said. “There was lots of information that was not shared.”

The judge added that she also felt “there are strong arguments by the defense.”

“I think the jury is going to get to decide,” she said.

OpenAI lawyers have denied Musk’s allegations, saying Musk was aware of the company’s for-profit plans as early as 2018. OpenAI has also pointed out that it is still controlled by OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.

“Mr Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Business Insider. “We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best resourced nonprofits ever.”

A spokesperson for Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk has filed multiple lawsuits against OpenAI. Most recently, his AI company, xAI, sued OpenAI in September, accusing it of stealing trade secrets and targeting its employees for recruitment. At the time, an OpenAI spokesperson told Business that the lawsuit is “the latest chapter in Mr. Musk’s ongoing harassment.”

Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015, but left the company in 2018. At the time he said his work with OpenAI could present a conflict of interest with Tesla’s AI ambitions.

Since, Musk has repeatedly criticized Altman and OpenAI, including the company’s structure. Musk later went on to launch his own AI company, xAI, in 2023.




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OpenAI wants a new head of preparedness, but here’s why the $555,000 role could be hard to fill

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Recruiting a new head of preparedness may be trickier for OpenAI than you might think.

The ChatGPT maker recently generated buzz online when it said the position — which pays $555,000 a year plus equity — is up for grabs. Yet some tech-industry observers say finding someone who’s qualified and willing to take it on poses a challenge.

Whoever lands it will be tasked with balancing safety concerns and the demands of CEO Sam Altman, who has shown a penchant for releasing products at an exceptionally fast clip. This year, OpenAI rolled out its Sora 2 video app, Instant Checkout for ChatGPT, new AI models, developer tools, and more advanced agent capabilities.

The head of preparedness role is “close to an impossible job,” because at times the person in it will likely need to tell Altman to slow down or that certain goals shouldn’t be met, said Maura Grossman, a research professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Computer Science. They’ll be “rolling a rock up a steep hill,” she said.

Altman himself has even described the position as intense.

“This will be a stressful job, and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,” he recently wrote on X.

Still, it could be a dream come true for the right individual. OpenAI has had a major impact on people’s lives, and the more than half a million dollars in base pay is in line with what AI talent can expect to earn these days.

Who might be qualified for the job

The posting for the position doesn’t list common requirements such as a college degree or a minimum number of years of work experience.

OpenAI said a person “might thrive” in the role if they have led technical teams; are comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty; can align diverse stakeholders around safety decisions; and have deep technical expertise in machine learning, AI safety, evaluation, security, or adjacent risk domains.

OpenAI’s former head of preparedness, Aleksander Madry, moved into a new role in July 2024. He left a vacancy within the company’s Safety Systems team, which builds evaluations, safety frameworks, and safeguards for its AI models.

Madry has a background in academia, but a seasoned tech-industry executive would be a better fit going forward, said Richard Lachman, a professor of digital media at Toronto Metropolitan University. Academic types, he said, tend to be more cautious and risk-averse.

Lachman expects OpenAI to seek out someone who can protect the company’s public image regarding safety, while allowing it to continue innovating quickly and driving growth. “This is not quite a ‘yes person,’ but somebody who’s going to be on brand,” he said.

OpenAI’s approach to safety has raised concerns internally, prompting some prominent early employees, including a former head of its safety team, to resign. The company has also been sued by some people who allege it reinforces delusions and drives other harmful behavior.

In October, OpenAI acknowledged that some ChatGPT users have exhibited possible signs of mental health problems. The company said it was working with mental health experts to improve how the chatbot responds to those who show signs of psychosis or mania, self-harm or suicide, or emotional attachment.




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