Inside OpenAI's Plans to Keep Pace with Competitors

By the end of 2026, OpenAI – the AI firm behind ChatGPT – plans to nearly double its workforce, expanding from roughly 4,500 to 8,000 employees.

The target is designed to keep pace with OpenAI’s two principal competitors: Google, which is seeing growth in everyday chatbot users, and Anthropic, which is gaining momentum with enterprise customers.

Reaching this milestone would require onboarding about 12 people per day, according to the Financial Times, across engineering, research, sales and product development.

The company also intends to deepen its investment in “technical ambassadorship” roles to ensure its own teams fully utilise OpenAI tools and capabilities.

Today, the average tenure for a US-based OpenAI employee stands at around 16 months.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI has attracted significant talent from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta, Business Insider reports.

Over the past three years, nearly half of OpenAI’s hires have come from one of these four companies.

OpenAI’s most recent funding round valued the company at $840 billion, with major backers – including Big Tech firms and Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank – participating in the US$110 billion raise.

Sam Altman, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenAI, says: “We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research and products to make AI more capable, reliable and broadly useful.

"SoftBank, NVIDIA and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale. Building AI that works for everyone will require deep collaboration across the stack and we’re excited to do this together.”

Staying ahead of the competition 

OpenAI’s latest recruitment surge reportedly follows an internal “code red” issued by Sam in December 2025, pausing non‑essential projects and refocusing teams on accelerating core development.

The move forms part of a broader strategic reset aimed at narrowing the gap with customers opting for Google or Anthropic.

Anthropic has emerged as the leading choice for first‑time enterprise AI buyers, according to the Financial Times, which cited card and billing data from more than 50,000 customers of payments startup Ramp - indicating a reversal of the companies’ positions versus a year ago.

A spokesperson for OpenAI firmly disputed that conclusion: “The notion that enterprise market share can be derived from Ramp credit card data is insane. It’s a bit like saying global lemon sales can be calculated based on my kid’s lemonade stand.

“Large enterprise clients do not pay for multimillion-dollar contracts with a credit card. And they likely don’t even use Ramp,” he added.

OpenAI's plans to expand

Despite accelerated hiring, both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly loss‑making, investing billions of dollars more than they generate in revenue to train successive generations of AI models.

Both are targeting a path to profitability through cost discipline and revenue growth, with an eye toward potential public listings in 2026.

While ChatGPT remains the standout consumer AI application - attracting roughly 900 million users since its 2023 launch - about 90% do not pay for access.

To extend their lead, the two companies are pursuing divergent go‑to‑market strategies: OpenAI is aiming to do “everything, everywhere, all at once,” as one investor put it, while Anthropic is concentrating on selling its Claude model to enterprise customers.

OpenAI also plans to deepen its growth through partnerships with Amazon. Sam explains: “OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people.

“Combining OpenAI’s intelligence with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale.”