With the enterprise market suddenly collapsing, OpenAI, which boasts 900 million weekly active users, is also urgently seeking a lifeline.
In March 2026, OpenAI experienced a strategic upheaval.
On March 25, it announced the shutdown of its AI video generation product, Sora, and the discontinuation of its standalone app and API. As the most sensational product in the AI video field, the industry once defined its epoch-making significance as the "Sora moment." However, from its high-profile launch last September to its announcement of shutdown, Sora only survived for about six months.
This is just a small part of OpenAI's drastic measures and tightened defenses.
On March 20th, Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI's Applications division, sent an email to all employees, the core message of which was that ChatGPT, the AI programming platform Codex, and the self-developed browser Atlas would be integrated into a unified desktop super application. Simultaneously, OpenAI would prioritize Codex strategically, rather than ChatGPT, which already boasts 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paid subscribers.
This points to a signal: the DAU logic is failing. During this year's Spring Festival, amidst the subsidy war among AI apps in China, major companies still held onto their belief in traffic, thinking that growth could be converted into competitive momentum.
However, according to recent statistics from enterprise payment platform Ramp, among companies making their first AI service purchase, the proportion choosing Anthropic is now three times that of OpenAI. Just three months ago, OpenAI held a dominant 60% market share. Furthermore, according to data shared by both companies this year, enterprise clients account for approximately 80% of Anthropic's business, while this figure is only 40% for OpenAI.
The explosive popularity of OpenClaw is one of the reasons for this shift in the landscape. Its rapid expansion of AI application scenarios has increased token consumption and amplified the advantages of the more stable and controllable Anthropic model, making ChatGPT pale in comparison to its strengths in chat and content creation.
This dramatic shift is directly reflected in revenue changes. According to OpenAI's public data, its revenue in February was approximately $2 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic announced at the end of February that it had added $6 billion in revenue in a single month, almost entirely from its programming product, Claude Code.
The situation reversed, prompting OpenAI to swiftly "respond with full force, as if sounding a red alert."
In January of this year, Altman also announced a "significant slowdown" in hiring. On March 22, according to the Financial Times, OpenAI will hire 3,500 new employees to help with product integration, and plans to double its workforce from 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026. While strengthening its programming products, OpenAI is also preparing to emulate Anthropic's business model, aiming to serve enterprises.
This storm from across the ocean is also dramatically reshaping China's AI industry.
The year 2025 was besieged.
By 2025, OpenAI will face greater challenges. The AI battlefield will shift from ChatGPT's dominance to a multi-player competition.
In February 2025, DeepSeek-R1 broke through the encirclement with its advantages of open source, inference capabilities, and low-cost computing power, and led Chinese open source models to collectively take the stage.
At its I/O developer conference in May, Google released Gemini 3, which surpassed GPT-5 in several key benchmark tests. In November, Gemini's monthly active users climbed to 650 million, a 195% increase compared to 2024.
In response, Altman's strategy was to continuously expand its product line. In 2025, OpenAI launched the Sora video generation tool, acquired the AI hardware company owned by former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, launched the AI programming platform Codex, and also integrated e-commerce functionality into ChatGPT.
In October 2025, at OpenAI's DevDay conference, Altman showcased his latest innovations: the release of the self-developed browser Atlas, the launch of the Apps SDK to create an "AI version of the App Store," the release of AgentKit to enable the construction of intelligent agents in 8 minutes, the full commercialization of the Codex programming tool, and the opening of the APIs of GPT-5 Pro and Sora 2 to developers.
Altman described OpenAI’s expansion as “betting on a series of startups internally.”
Unlike OpenAI's aggressive expansion, Anthropic has never ventured into multimodal generation fields such as audio, image, and video. Instead, it focuses on a "narrow and deep" approach, optimizing user experience in areas that enterprises care about more: long context, security and compliance, system integration, and customization. This approach has earned Anthropic the trust of more compliant industries such as technology, finance, healthcare, and government, resulting in a 92% renewal rate for major clients.
Entering 2026, Claude suddenly opened up the enterprise market, and Anthropic's power accelerated its explosive growth. Ramp data shows that Claude's subscriptions grew by 4.9% in February 2026, while OpenAI's declined by 1.5%. The latest data from tech media Axios shows that Anthropic's paid market share in the US enterprise market has climbed to over 73%.
Under pressure, Altman also overturned the "all-encompassing approach" of the past year. In an all-hands letter, Simo stated: "We realize that we have spread our efforts across too many applications and technology stacks, and we must simplify. This fragmentation is slowing us down and making it difficult for us to achieve the quality standards we want."
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Caught between a rock and a hard place, OpenAI must reassess its business. Cutting out those money-burning and unprofitable "copycat" tasks has become a primary objective—with Sora, which received critical acclaim but failed commercially, being the first to be targeted.
Data shows that Sora has only generated $2.1 million in in-app purchase revenue since its launch. In December 2025, Sora's app downloads declined by 32%, and in January of this year, installs further dropped by 45%. In contrast, Codex has seen a threefold increase in users and a fivefold increase in usage this year alone, with weekly active users exceeding 2 million.
However, Sora's shutdown doesn't mean the entire video streaming sector is cooling down. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 is still progressing rapidly. According to a research report by CICC, in February of this year, Jimo's DAU surged from 3.28 million to 5.72 million within 20 days. Volcano Engine's daily token consumption exceeded 100 trillion, with queue numbers once exceeding 90,000. A blogger involved in AI-generated film and television production told *China Entrepreneur* that the price for AI-generated short videos has even soared to tens of thousands of yuan per second.
However, both OpenAI and Anthropic are at critical junctures in their IPOs, and the battle for market share is fierce, leaving OpenAI with no time to spare.
Last year, OpenAI raised significant funds in March, August, and December. In February of this year, OpenAI completed a $110 billion funding round, valuing the company at approximately $840 billion post-money. Reports indicate that Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft's substantial investments came with numerous cooperation agreements.
In February 2026, Anthropic also completed a $30 billion Series G funding round, valuing the company at $380 billion. Research firm Epoch AI predicts that Anthropic's annual revenue may surpass OpenAI's in the second half of 2026.
From volume parameters to volume delivery
So, after this business integration, what form will ChatGPT's products take after it joins Codex, which will form the core framework of OpenAI in the future?
Based on information from various sources, OpenAI's first step is to further strengthen the Codex agent: adding system-level autonomous execution capabilities to make it the "brain" capable of handling AI workflows. Furthermore, the integration of ChatGPT and the Atlas browser will unify the three core capabilities of dialogue interaction, browser search, and code generation within a single interface. This also involves unifying the underlying account and permission systems.
To gain more enterprise users, OpenAI will inevitably become more "heavy." It will no longer simply provide APIs and conversational interfaces, but will need to transform AI capabilities into quantifiable business results.
For example, the "forward-deployed engineers" model has recently become very popular in Silicon Valley. This model involves sending experts directly into companies to assist in customizing and implementing models in exchange for income.
This strategy was first popularized by data intelligence company Palantir. While its stock price fell below $6 at the end of 2022, it reached an all-time high of $207 in 2025, with its market capitalization once approaching $500 billion. According to its latest financial report, Palantir's gross margin reached a high of 82% in 2025.
“Many people are focused on how individuals will evolve into super-individuals under AI. But the incremental value that AI will bring to businesses is a more noteworthy aspect,” Su Chunyuan, founder of Guanyuan Data, told China Entrepreneur.
The issue of DAU failure is not only being raised by OpenAI, but is also prompting domestic AI companies to re-examine the effectiveness of traffic logic, starting to shift from "converting parameters" and "converting traffic" to "converting scenarios" and "converting delivery". An industry insider revealed that from the end of 2025 to the beginning of 2026, the core of internal discussions at many AI companies has shifted from "model scores" to "customer renewal rates".
“All consumer-facing AI products are essentially unprofitable; they cater to emotional needs.” DingTalk CEO Wu Zhao recently told China Entrepreneur. “Using AI to create images and videos hasn’t truly generated value for AI. The essence of AI should be to think about how to achieve transformation at the production level.”
This article is from the WeChat official account "China Entrepreneur Magazine" (ID: iceo-com-cn) , authored by Sun Xin and Wang Yijie, edited by Li Yuan and He Yifan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.
