OpenAI told employees on Friday that co-founder and president Greg Brockman will permanently lead all product strategy, merging ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API into a single organisation. In an internal memo seen by Wired, Brockman wrote that the company would "invest in a single agentic platform and merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified agentic experience for all." The restructuring comes three days before Google I/O 2026 and amid mounting evidence that OpenAI's dominance is no longer guaranteed.
The side quests are over
Until Friday, ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API operated as largely independent product lines — each with its own leadership, roadmap, and competitive positioning. ChatGPT pursued consumer reach across its 900 million weekly active users. Codex served developers building AI-assisted coding tools. The API monetised the broader ecosystem. That structure created internal competition for compute, engineering talent, and strategic attention.
Brockman's case for the merger is blunt. On a recent podcast with Big Technology, he said OpenAI's computing power is "not enough for even a personal assistant and the Codex line." A ChatGPT that cannot write and run code is a chat interface. A Codex without a consumer-facing layer is a tool that only engineers can access. Convergence, he argued, was already happening in practice — the reorganisation just formalises it on paper.
The consolidation caps a strategic retreat that began in December when CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" internally. Since then, OpenAI has shut down Sora, its video generation app that consumed vast compute relative to its revenue. It shelved OpenAI for Science. Three senior executives — including former chief product officer Kevin Weil — departed in a single day in April. The company has described these paused initiatives internally as "side quests."
Gemini is no longer a sideshow
The competitive pressure driving this consolidation is documented in hard numbers. Google Gemini has grown its share of AI web traffic from 5.7% to 21.5% over the past twelve months, according to SimilarWeb data cited by Fortune and CMC Markets. Over the same period, ChatGPT's share declined from 86.7% to 64.5% — a loss of more than 22 percentage points.
The shift coincides with Google's Gemini 3 launch in late 2025, which demonstrated superior performance in reasoning tasks and multimodal comprehension. Gemini now reaches over 650 million monthly active users. Google I/O 2026, opening this Monday, has agentic coding and Gemini updates as its headline agenda items. Two years ago, OpenAI countered Google I/O by unveiling GPT-4o the day before the conference. This year, OpenAI is not countering with a product launch — it is countering with an org chart.
Meanwhile, Cursor has reached $2 billion in annualised revenue and is in talks to raise at a $50 billion valuation, demonstrating that agentic coding is the fastest-growing category in developer tools. Anthropic's Claude Code has been gaining ground with enterprise developers. The era of ChatGPT as a near-monopoly in generative AI is definitively over.
What the 'super app' actually looks like
The reorganisation formalises a project first reported in March: OpenAI has been developing a desktop application that would bring ChatGPT, Codex, and its Atlas web browser together into a single "super app". Thibault Sottiaux, the engineer who built Codex into one of OpenAI's fastest-growing products, now leads the combined core product. Nick Turley, who oversaw ChatGPT's expansion, moves to enterprise and critical industries.
Brockman described the vision on Big Technology: "Imagine one application where anything you want your computer to do, you can ask it. There's computer-use browsing built in... all of your conversations, regardless of application — whether it's for chat or whether it's for code, whether it's for general knowledge work — that's all unified."
Codex will expand first to cover productivity tasks beyond coding, before ChatGPT and Atlas are folded in. No launch date has been announced. The ambition is clear: a single interface where a user can have a conversation, write code, execute multi-step tasks, browse the web, and manage files — all powered by the same model, all generating revenue through a single subscription or API billing relationship.
This follows the trajectory we've been tracking at Heygentic — OpenAI's steady pivot toward enterprise and agentic workflows that do real work, not just answer questions.
The IPO angle
The clearest explanation for the timing extends beyond competitive pressure. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation in March, and is targeting a public listing as early as Q4 2026. A prospectus describing three separate product teams competing for compute invites analysts to discount the multiple. A prospectus describing a single agentic platform with 900 million weekly users and a unified roadmap does the opposite.
The financial picture is complicated. OpenAI projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 on roughly $25 billion in annualised revenue — spending $1.69 for every dollar earned. Profitability is not expected before 2029 or 2030. CFO Sarah Friar has warned internally that the company may not be ready for a 2026 listing if infrastructure spending continues to outpace revenue growth.
Simplifying the product story doesn't fix the unit economics. But it makes the pitch to institutional investors considerably cleaner at a moment when OpenAI needs that clarity most.
What this means if you're running a business
If you're a business owner who has been building workflows around ChatGPT, Codex, or the OpenAI API, the practical implications are real but not yet urgent.
Short term: Nothing changes immediately. Your existing ChatGPT subscriptions and API integrations continue to work. The super app will roll out gradually, and OpenAI has a strong commercial interest in not disrupting paying customers.
Medium term: Expect consolidation of subscription tiers. The current separation between ChatGPT Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans may merge into a single platform with usage-based pricing for agentic compute. OpenAI has already begun shifting from flat-rate pricing to credit-based models for agent workloads, and the unified platform accelerates that transition.
Strategic consideration: The AI platform you bet on matters more than it did six months ago. Google Gemini is a genuine alternative with deep ecosystem integration. Anthropic's Claude is winning enterprise developers. Cursor owns the agentic coding niche. The assumption that ChatGPT is the default is no longer safe — and the fact that OpenAI felt compelled to reorganise its entire product structure to compete confirms it.
The strongest position for any business is platform flexibility. Build your AI workflows with abstraction layers that let you swap providers. The organisations that locked themselves into a single vendor's API without an exit strategy are the ones most exposed as this market reshuffles.
What to watch
Brockman said the complete super app vision should ship "over the next couple of months." That timeline matters. Google I/O this week will showcase Gemini's agentic capabilities in Android, Chrome, and developer tools — the exact territory OpenAI's reorganisation is designed to defend.
The deeper question is whether one person can run both product strategy and infrastructure for a company with 900 million weekly users, thousands of employees, a multi-billion-dollar data centre programme, and an IPO on the horizon. OpenAI's board has implicitly answered that question by giving Brockman both jobs. Whether that answer holds will become clear by the time the super app ships — or doesn't.
Sources
- OpenAI merges ChatGPT and Codex under Greg Brockman — The Next Web
- OpenAI Unifies ChatGPT, Codex, and Developer API Under Brockman — TechTimes
- OpenAI President Greg Brockman: Doubling Down on Text Models, The Superapp Plan — Big Technology
- ChatGPT's market share is slipping as Google and rivals close the gap — Fortune
- Cursor has reportedly surpassed $2B in annualized revenue — TechCrunch
- OpenAI closes funding round at an $852 billion valuation — CNBC
