OpenAI reportedly ditches its "side quests" strategy to focus on coding tools and business customers

OpenAI now believes its strategy of launching as many products as possible at the same time left the company vulnerable. A major strategic shift is supposed to get things back on track.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's leadership is preparing a significant change in direction: instead of spreading resources across numerous product fronts, the company plans to concentrate on two core areas: coding tools and business customers.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, laid out the plans in a company-wide meeting. CEO Sam Altman and Head of Research Mark Chen are actively reviewing which areas should be scaled back. Employees will learn about the specific changes in the coming weeks.

"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," Simo told employees, according to the Journal. "We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front."

The company just announced strategic partnerships to push its new enterprise agent platform "Frontier" to a broader audience together with private equity and consulting firms, helping companies better implement the technology into real-world workflows.

Spreading too thin came at a cost

Last year, OpenAI announced a flood of new products: the Sora video generator, the Atlas web browser, a hardware device built with Jony Ive, and e-commerce features for ChatGPT. At the time, Altman compared the approach to "betting on a series of startups" within OpenAI.

But current and former employees paint a different picture, according to the Journal: the sheer number of parallel projects led to a lack of focus, and the strategic direction was hard to follow at times. Compute resources—the scarcest asset at any frontier lab—were often shuffled between teams on short notice. The organizational structure had also grown increasingly confusing. The Sora team, for example, was placed under the research department despite being responsible for shipping one of the company's most high-profile products.

Sora itself illustrates the problem. The standalone app, which launched in September with a TikTok-like interface, briefly hit number one in the Apple App Store. After that, usage flatlined. OpenAI now reportedly plans to fold video generation into the main ChatGPT app.

OpenAI also launched an agent mode last year, essentially browser use, that reportedly lost most of its users because nobody knew what it was actually for.

Anthropic's focused bet on coding is paying off

According to the WSJ, the immediate trigger for the realignment is Anthropic's rise. The competitor has grown into a fast-moving AI provider for businesses, largely thanks to the viral success of its products Claude Code and Cowork. Anthropic has placed far fewer product bets than OpenAI, consistently zeroing in on the enterprise and coding market. The company has deliberately stayed away from audio, image, and video generation so far.

Simo described Anthropic's success to employees as a "wake-up call." The company is "very much acting as if it's a code red," she said, but also said that "declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense."