Anthropic’s Rise Forces OpenAI Into Its Most Significant Strategic Pivot Yet

An AI for the masses, with a browser, ad-based funding, and its own hardware? What OpenAI lined up in 2025 to knock Google off its throne doesn’t appear to be working out.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is planning a fundamental strategic shift. The company intends to focus more heavily on programming solutions and enterprise customers going forward, scaling back a number of side projects in the process. The backdrop is growing competitive pressure from rivals such as Anthropic and Google.

The Strategic Shift at a Glance

According to the Wall Street Journal, Fidji Simo, who is responsible for OpenAI’s applications business, has already outlined the planned changes at a company-wide staff meeting. CEO Sam Altman and research chief Mark Chen are reportedly currently reviewing which projects should be put on hold. Employees are expected to be informed in concrete terms in the coming weeks.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side projects. We really need to get productivity right overall, and in the enterprise space in particular,” Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, is said to have told staff.

The change of course marks a departure from the previous strategy of occupying as many product areas as possible simultaneously. Altman himself once described this approach as betting on “a number of startups” within the company. Among the projects now under review are the video generator Sora, the browser project Atlas, and new e-commerce features for ChatGPT.

Growing Pressure from Anthropic and Google

The most significant trigger for the strategic pivot is Anthropic’s rise in the lucrative enterprise customer market. The startup has established itself as a dominant AI provider for business customers with its products Claude Code and Cowork. Many software developers in the tech industry now use Claude Code as their preferred tool, which even triggered a brief decline in global stock markets last month.

Anthropic is pursuing a deliberately focused strategy: the company concentrates on the enterprise and coding market and has so far refrained from products such as image or video generation. Simo is said to have referred to the competitor’s success internally as a “wake-up call.” Google is also increasingly targeting the B2B space with its Gemini platform and is continuously expanding its influence among enterprise customers, further increasing the pressure on OpenAI.

Current and former employees confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the “everything at once” strategy of the past year had led to a sense of disorientation internally. Computing capacity was shifted between teams at short notice, and the organizational structure became increasingly opaque.

Pentagon Deal Weighs on OpenAI’s Reputation Among End Consumers

OpenAI is gaining an unexpected competitive advantage through a political decision: the U.S. Department of Defense has officially classified Anthropic as a security risk in the supply chain. This has caused some companies to hesitate to deploy Anthropic’s technology. Anthropic has filed a lawsuit against this decision.

However, OpenAI’s close collaboration with the Pentagon has caused discomfort among a portion of end consumers. Critics see the military cooperation as a contradiction to the ethical principles the company originally proclaimed. This could weigh on public trust in the long term, even though OpenAI continues to hold a strong position in the consumer market.

OpenAI Catches Up in the Coding Space

In direct competition with Anthropic, OpenAI has recently gained ground. With a new version of its Codex app and the updated model GPT 5.4, tailored to professional applications, the company has managed to significantly increase its user numbers in the coding space. Simo announced that Codex now counts more than two million weekly active users, representing a fourfold increase since the beginning of the year.

In parallel, OpenAI is working to deploy its engineers alongside consulting firms and business partners to accelerate AI adoption across various industries. Longer-term projects, such as the planned hardware device developed in collaboration with designer Jony Ive, are to be more strongly oriented toward the theme of productivity going forward, according to Simo.

IPO as an Additional Pressure Factor

The competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is further fueled by both companies’ plans to go public later this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI has internally floated the fourth quarter of 2026 as a possible timeframe for an IPO. The impending stock market listing increases the pressure on both companies to demonstrate clear growth prospects and a compelling strategic direction.

Whether the strategic shift will bring OpenAI the hoped-for turnaround in its competition with Anthropic and Google remains to be seen. What is clear is this: the battle for dominance in the AI market, particularly in the lucrative B2B and coding segment, has reached a new level of intensity.