Anthropic grew out of more than just concern for AI safety—it was born from a bitter power struggle and personal conflict at OpenAI. A report by Sam Altman biographer Keach Hagey reveals how personal slights, rivalries, and strategic disagreements led to what may be the most consequential split in the AI industry.
OpenAI is killing Sora in two stages. The web and app version goes dark on April 26, 2026, with the Sora API following on September 24, 2026. OpenAI is urging users to download their content before the cutoff dates. Videos and images can be exported directly from the Sora library.
The company says it hasn't decided yet whether there will be a final export window after those dates. If one happens, users will get an email heads-up. Once all deadlines pass, user data gets permanently deleted. The shutdown also takes down the sora.chatgpt.com platform, which handled image and video generation. Full details are on OpenAI's help page under "What to know about the Sora discontinuation."
Sora's demise is part of a bigger strategic pivot. OpenAI wants to funnel compute toward coding tools and enterprise customers—a play that mirrors rival Anthropic—and a super app rolling ChatGPT and other tools into one package. Sora will stick around as a research project focused on world models, with the long-term goal of "automating the physical economy."
Update: The leaked draft blog posts have surfaced online, revealing Anthropic’s plans for a new model class above its existing Opus line. The documents show two possible name candidates, details about a deliberately slow release strategy, and a strong focus on cybersecurity.
OpenAI is adding plugins to Codex that integrate with popular work tools like Slack, Figma, Notion, Gmail, and Google Drive. The plugins go beyond coding - OpenAI says they also help with planning, research, and coordination. Under the hood, plugins bundle predefined prompt workflows ("skills"), app integrations, and MCP server configurations into installable packages, similar to ChatGPT integrations. They work across the Codex app, command line, and IDE extensions. Developers can build their own and distribute them through local or team-wide "marketplaces." An official curated directory is already live, with self-publishing coming soon.
The move is part of OpenAI's broader push into coding tools and enterprise customers, which includes a planned "super app" combining ChatGPT, Codex, and the Atlas browser. Codex now has over 1.6 million weekly active users, with a Windows version shipping just recently.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both growing fast, but they report revenue very differently, The Information reports. OpenAI's annualized revenue is around $25 billion; Anthropic's is $19 billion. Both calculate this similarly: four weeks of revenue times 13, with Anthropic adding monthly subscriptions times 12.
The key difference is how they handle cloud partners. OpenAI gives 20 percent of revenue to Microsoft and reports the number before that deduction. For Azure cloud sales, it only counts its 20 percent cut. Anthropic does the opposite: It books all cloud sales through AWS, Microsoft, and Google as its own revenue, listing the providers' shares as sales and marketing costs. Anthropic considers itself the primary provider, while OpenAI treats Microsoft as the primary provider for Azure.
Both follow US accounting rules (GAAP), but their numbers are difficult to compare. Anthropic's revenue likely looks higher on paper than it would under the same method. That matters as both companies head toward an IPO.
OpenAI has put development of an erotic chatbot on hold indefinitely, the Financial Times reports. The decision comes after employees and investors raised concerns about the societal impact of sexual AI content. OpenAI's well-being advisory board had already unanimously opposed the planned "Adult Mode," with one board member warning that OpenAI risked creating a "sexy suicide coach." The company is also dealing with technical problems - its age verification system misidentified minors as adults in roughly 12 percent of cases. With 100 million underage users per week, that's a significant gap.
The AI company, currently valued at $730 billion, now wants to wait for long-term research on the effects of sexually explicit chats and emotional attachments before moving forward. According to the FT, there have already been internal discussions about scrapping the project entirely. Investors saw a poor risk-reward ratio, and employees questioned whether the project aligned with OpenAI's mission.
In ChatGPT's app code, the project appears under the name "Citron Mode," with planned age verification for users 18 and older. OpenAI is now shifting its focus to productivity tools and a "super app" built around ChatGPT.
OpenAI has reportedly finished pretraining its new AI model, codenamed "Spud," CEO Sam Altman told employees in an internal memo, according to The Information. Altman said the company expects to have a "very strong model" in "a few weeks" that can "really accelerate the economy."
"Things are moving faster than many of us expected," Altman wrote. In a related move, Fidji Simo's product organization is being renamed "AGI Deployment." To free up computing capacity for Spud and other priorities, OpenAI will shut down its video app Sora.
Spud may also serve as the foundation for OpenAI's planned desktop "superapp," which would combine ChatGPT, the coding agent Codex, and the browser Atlas. OpenAI needs to close the gap with Anthropic, which has been gaining significant traction with agent-based AI systems for business customers, particularly through Claude Code. OpenAI's Codex and Frontier are still playing catch-up.
OpenAI is expanding its record financing round by another 10 billion dollars, pushing the total past 120 billion dollars, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC. The increase had already been flagged when the initial 110 billion dollar round was announced. This could be OpenAI's last private funding round before a potential IPO later this year.
New investors include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. Microsoft is also participating, with Friar calling the company "an incredible partner." A leaked investor document lists Microsoft as OpenAI's biggest risk factor, which made some headlines but is hardly surprising given how heavily OpenAI still relies on Microsoft for both funding and compute. The dependency runs both ways, though: OpenAI is also an enormous risk for Microsoft.
The partnership has been showing cracks, and two recent moves make that hard to ignore: Microsoft is ramping up efforts to train its own models toward "super intelligence," and it's bringing Anthropic's Cowork technology into Copilot, pulling in tech from OpenAI's biggest B2B rival, of all companies. Microsoft's reliability as a distribution partner for OpenAI models is starting to look shaky.
