As rival Anthropic upgrades its programming tools, competitive pressure on OpenAI continues to intensify. The company's CEO Sam Altman told employees and investors that OpenAI is regaining its growth momentum. An internal Slack message showed that Altman told OpenAI employees last Friday that the monthly growth rate of its popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT "returned to more than 10%."Altman also revealed that OpenAI will launch an “upgraded dialogue model” this week.

Currently, ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users, but Google and Anthropic are constantly encroaching on its market share. In December last year, OpenAI launched a "red alert" to optimize ChatGPT and temporarily shelved multiple projects to focus on hard work.

In an internal message last Friday, Altman said that OpenAI’s programming product Codex grew by about 50% week-on-week. Codex directly competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has seen a significant increase in users over the past year.

Last week, OpenAI released a new Codex model, GPT‑5.3-Codex, and also launched a standalone application for Apple computer users. According to internal sources, Altman called Codex's growth "extremely rapid."

"It's been a great week," Altman wrote in the message.

But the week has also been fraught with controversy.

Anthropic teased OpenAI's decision to advertise within ChatGPT in a Super Bowl ad, and Altman and other executives immediately fired back on social media. Altman posted on the

According to people familiar with the matter, OpenAI will officially launch advertising testing within ChatGPT on Monday. The company said last month that the ads will be clearly marked, appear only at the bottom of the chatbot's responses, and will not affect the content of ChatGPT's answers.

The person said that OpenAI expects advertising revenue to account for less than half of total revenue in the long term. The digital advertising market has long been dominated by Google and Meta, with Amazon also becoming an important player in recent years.

Multiple sources revealed that as OpenAI prepares to complete a financing round that may reach hundreds of billions of dollars, Altman and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer are constantly promoting the company's growth prospects to investors.

A person who did not want to be named because the talks were confidential said that in the private meeting, the executive team focused on OpenAI’s advantages in C-end users, enterprise business growth and computing resources.

OpenAI showed relevant data charts in its financing communication, and Codex is seizing Claude Code’s market share.

Sources say that OpenAI’s financing negotiations will enter a critical stage in the next two weeks. In March this year, OpenAI completed US$41 billion in financing, of which SoftBank invested US$30 billion and other investors contributed US$11 billion.

It was previously reported that this round of financing may be completed in two parts: the first part of the funds comes from Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, which is negotiating for an investment of up to 50 billion U.S. dollars; subsequent investors such as SoftBank will follow up, and SoftBank has negotiated an additional investment of 30 billion U.S. dollars.

The specific details of this round of financing have not yet been finalized and adjustments are possible.