OpenAI Massive Change on the Eve of IPO. Merging ChatGPT and Codex Betting on AI Agents: Can It Once Again Surpass 900 Billion Valued Anthropic?

TradingKey — According to a report by WIRED, OpenAI recently announced a corporate restructuring to consolidate its product lines. Its three core product offerings—ChatGPT, Codex, and the API—are being dismantled and merged into a unified product organization to "embrace" the Agentic Future; co-founder and President Greg Brockman, a technical heavyweight, has taken full control of product strategy.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has just achieved a $900 billion valuation in its latest funding round, becoming the world's most valuable independent AI unicorn and surpassing OpenAI's latest valuation in the private market.

This executive shake-up and product integration are viewed by the market as a "last stand" for OpenAI ahead of its IPO. Will this move truly be enough to save the company?

Greg Brockman Takes Over Product Management; OpenAI Reboots Technical Roadmap

According to reports, co-founder and President Greg Brockman will lead the company's product strategy while maintaining oversight of AI infrastructure. Brockman had previously stepped in to lead product during the leave of Fidji Simo, the nominal "CEO of AGI Deployment"; this leadership transition has now officially taken effect. In short, he is now responsible for everything from compute and chips to user engagement with ChatGPT, becoming the true power broker at OpenAI.

Greg Brockman is a veteran core figure who co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others. Prior to that, he served as the CTO of Stripe, the world's largest independent online payment giant, where he personally built Stripe's underlying technical architecture and API systems, supporting the payment operations of millions of enterprises globally.

Another position seeing a change is the Head of Consumer Product. Nick Turley, who has been in full charge of ChatGPT since its launch, built it from scratch into the world's top super-app with 900 million weekly active users. He has been reassigned to lead the enterprise business and is succeeded by former Instagram Vice President Ashley Alexander, who previously led healthcare applications at OpenAI. Alexander spent 12 years at Meta and, as co-head of product at Instagram, drove the growth of Instagram's advertising business from the ground up.

Integrating ChatGPT and Codex, OpenAI Enters the AI Agent Era

In an internal memo, Brockman explained the objective of consolidating product lines: "To advance toward an Agentic Future with singular focus and achieve total victory across both consumer and enterprise sectors."

Brockman believes the primary issue with OpenAI's current three flagship products is their siloed nature and excessive fragmentation. Internally, ChatGPT, Codex, and API are operated by distinct teams. ChatGPT serves as a conversational AI platform for general consumers and acts as OpenAI's primary traffic gateway. Codex is a specialized large language model dedicated to parsing and generating code, serving as the underlying core technology for Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and targeting professional programmers. The API (Application Programming Interface) is primarily sold to tech companies and independent developers, allowing users to integrate OpenAI’s intelligence into their own products via API calls without the need to train their own large models.

From Brockman’s perspective, these three applications cannot reach their full potential unless they are integrated into a single "super app." Consequently, OpenAI has tasked Thibault Sottiaux, the former head of Codex, to spearhead the creation of this unified application.

Reports indicate that this application will be more than just an upgrade to ChatGPT; it will be a unified desktop application featuring its own browser and web-browsing capabilities. It will inherit Codex’s robust code execution functions to write scripts while remaining as "user-friendly" as ChatGPT in interpreting intent. The application will be capable of executing complex digital tasks on behalf of the user, functioning as a so-called AI Agent.

Valuation Overtaken by Anthropic: Can OpenAI Reclaim the Global AI Throne?

As it approaches its IPO, OpenAI is undertaking a sweeping overhaul of its product and management structure, driven by the dual pressures of internal executive departures and external competition. Having lost several key leaders, including Kevin Weil, head of AI workspace, and Bill Peebles, co-lead of Sora, the company is facing a talent shortage, necessitating a consolidation of resources to focus on its most core missions.

On the external front, Anthropic—founded by former OpenAI employees—reached a valuation of $900 billion in its latest funding round, surpassing its former employer. Technologically, Anthropic’s Claude models have outperformed OpenAI in long-context processing and code generation. In terms of business growth, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) surged to $45 billion as of May, with revenue growing 500% in five months. It can even be said that Anthropic is accelerating its pace toward overtaking OpenAI across all dimensions.

Given these circumstances, can OpenAI regain its status as the world’s preeminent AI unicorn through this management and product reform? This depends on whether the overhaul can deliver results in several key areas that satisfy market expectations.

First, the market's biggest concern is OpenAI’s failure to meet weekly active user (WAU) and revenue expectations; despite ChatGPT’s large user base, growth has hit a bottleneck. If product consolidation allows it to be deeply embedded into users' daily lives and workflows, thereby increasing average daily usage and retention rates, OpenAI may achieve a long-awaited breakthrough in active users, restoring market confidence.

Regarding revenue, the consolidated product must provide OpenAI with the leverage to raise prices by demonstrating the professional utility of its AI Agent while staying ahead of lower-cost competitors. Analysts point out that OpenAI’s revenue performance has lagged behind Anthropic’s primarily because of the explosive growth of the latter’s automated coding tool, Claude Code. By integrating its products, OpenAI hopes to incorporate Codex’s programming capabilities into its platform to compete directly with rival products.

In terms of cost control, a point of optimism for investors is that AI Agents are expected to reduce compute costs by autonomously identifying the most efficient execution paths, which could help narrow OpenAI's significant operating losses.

In summary, OpenAI’s future market performance depends almost entirely on the outcome of this transformation. As long as it can launch an advanced AI Agent product, OpenAI still has the potential to reclaim its throne.