OpenAI Plans Business Model, Partly in Response to Anthropic

OpenAI plans to shift its focus to business-oriented products while shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability, executives said. The company intends to introduce a new artificial intelligence model for "high-value professional work" in the face of heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces. "You'll see a new model coming from us in short order," Sarah Friar, chief financial officer, told the AP.

Friar said that OpenAI has more than 900 million weekly users of its core ChatGPT product, and that about 95% of them "don't pay anything" for the popular chatbot. But while all those interactions build habits and reliance, they also strain the costly computing resources needed to power the company's AI systems and highlight the need for big business customers to help pay the bills. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, both lose more money than they make, putting the privately owned San Francisco-based AI research laboratories in fierce competition to generate more revenue as they race toward becoming publicly traded on Wall Street. A push to improve performance and sales of OpenAI's business-oriented products—already Anthropic's bread and butter—has driven OpenAI to abandon consumer initiatives like the AI video generator app Sora.

Codenamed Spud, OpenAI says its "smartest model yet" offers "stronger reasoning, better understanding of intent and dependencies, better follow-through and more reliable output in production." It will be part of OpenAI's answer to Anthropic's new Claude Mythos, which Anthropic says it is limiting to select customers because of its apparent ability to surpass human cybersecurity experts in finding or exploiting computer vulnerabilities. While most people can't use Mythos, Anthropic also on Thursday released Opus 4.7, describing it as its most powerful "generally available" model. OpenAI hours later introduced its own new specialized model called GPT-Rosalind, designed to advance drug discovery and other life sciences research. Friar said business customers accounted for about 20% of OpenAI's revenue in 2024; it's now 40% and expected to account for half of OpenAI's sales by the end of the year.