Sam Altman says Google “still poses a huge threat” and ChatGPT will declare code red “maybe twice a year for a long time”

Despite billions of dollars of investment and support from tech titans like Nvidia and even the British government, Google’s mighty power still seemingly terrifies OpenAI, or at least that’s what CEO Sam Altman says.

Altman recently got around to it Alex Kantrowitz PodcastBig Technology to talk about the AI ​​company. The backdrop to this conversation between Sam Altman and Alec Kantrowitz is the “code red” alert that Altman recently announced in response to Google Gemini 3. OpenAI has been leading for some time, but Google’s rapid advances have clearly worried OpenAI’s top dog. This is so significant to the conversation that beyond the introductions, Kantrowitz actually organizes the conversation.

Altman says red codes are quite common at the company. He says, “I think it’s good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat arises.” He also states, “I suspect we’ll be doing this once, maybe twice a year for a long time, and it’s just part of ensuring we win in our space.”

In fact, he claims that Google had a Code Red crisis when OpenAI launched ChatGPT but didn’t take OpenAI seriously enough to register it. “You know, I think Google is still a huge threat. An extremely powerful company.”

Altman tells Kantrowitz that earlier this year, DeepSeek entered the AI ​​scene and the code was red. He says, “Everyone here is doing code reds.” Part of what Altman is pointing out in this conversation is the idea that some people can become true to certain companies, which means that you can lose not only your technological identity, but also your brand identity.

“I think people really want to use one AI platform. They use a phone in their personal lives and they want to use the same type of phone at work most of the time. We’re seeing the same thing with AI.”

However, Altman also points to the problems of making a single AI the only one you employ. He says personalization is an “extremely difficult issue” these days. He says that often users have “one magical experience with ChatGPT” and it becomes their main bot.

“A famous example is in healthcare, where people put… a blood test into ChatGPT, or they put their symptoms in and find out they have something, go to the doctor and get cured of something they couldn’t understand before. These users are very sticky.”

He argues that for those who have an “unhealthy” relationship with their AI, “society over time will figure out where people should set that knob, and then people will have a huge choice and set it in completely different places.”

While personal freedom is part of Altman’s argument about how far AI chatbots can develop relationships with users, it’s strenuous not to understand why an AI company might not want to cut off what are arguably some of the most true consumers in the market. This is especially true when competition is fierce, with billions of dollars supporting everyone in the AI ​​arms race.

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