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OpenAI plans to nearly double its headcount by the end of the year as it accelerates sales to companies and gains an edge over rival Anthropic in the race for a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The $730 billion startup aimed to grow its workforce to about 8,000 from about 4,500 today, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
New employees will be primarily involved in product development, engineering, research, and sales. OpenAI also plans to ramp up hiring of experts focused on what the company calls “technology ambassadorships” to help companies more effectively leverage its tools, the people said.
OpenAI is preparing to add about 12 employees per day this year, signing a new lease for its San Francisco office and expanding its footprint in the city to more than 1 million square feet.
The hiring drive is part of AI Group’s strategic overhaul aimed at stemming Anthropic’s momentum with enterprise customers and fending off increased competition from Google.
Card and billing data from payments startup Ramp’s more than 50,000 customers shows that business customers making first-time AI purchases are choosing Anthropic three times as often as OpenAI, a reversal of where businesses were a year ago.
An OpenAI spokesperson disputed this data, saying, “The idea that enterprise market share can be derived from Ramp credit card data is insane. It’s like saying global lemon sales can be calculated based on children’s lemonade stands.”
“Large enterprise customers won’t pay for multi-million dollar contracts with credit cards, and they probably won’t use Ramp either,” he added.
Late last year, CEO Sam Altman issued a “Code Red,” directing employees to refocus on ChatGPT, the company’s core product.
Earlier this month, Fidji Simo, who runs OpenAI’s applications business, urged his staff to stop doing “side quests” and instead focus on improving the company’s Codex coding model, acquiring enterprise customers, and transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool.
Simo is also overseeing the bundling of Codex and ChatGPT into a single desktop app that can be sold to consumers and businesses, a move first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI is also in talks with a private equity firm to form a joint venture to roll out the startup’s products to PE Group’s portfolio companies.
OpenAI and Anthropic are both loss-making, spending billions of dollars more than they make in training the AI models that continue to advance the technology front.
Both companies are looking to cut costs, increase revenue and boost profits, and pressure is mounting on those efforts as they prepare to go public as early as this year.
For this reason, AI Group is actively hiring so-called forward-located engineers as part of its efforts to generate more revenue by having experts within the company to help customize AI models. This approach was pioneered by data intelligence company Palantir.
While Anthropic has primarily focused on selling its model, Claude, to enterprise customers since its launch in 2023, OpenAI has taken an approach that one investor described as “everything, everywhere, at once.”
ChatGPT has been the most successful consumer application of AI since its launch in 2023, but more than 90 percent of the more than 900 million people who regularly use chatbots do not pay for OpenAI.
In addition to exploring ways to monetize its vast user base, including advertising, OpenAI has also pursued video models, enterprise tools, robotics and other hardware devices.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic is targeting enterprises instead. The strategy has been in full swing since the launch of its coding tool Claude Code, with the company adding $1 billion in annual revenue every week this year.
OpenAI is moving resources to the enterprise market and increasing the number of paying consumers. By the end of the year, it expects half of its revenue to come from corporate customers, up from about 40% now.
OpenAI executives said this new focus reflects the success of coding tools such as Claude Code and Codex and “opened up a whole new realm of what we can do.”
“It will change the way we think about everything from products to services to market,” they added. Like the release of ChatGPT and the inference model, the unexpected momentum the coding model brought to the company meant that “suddenly the company pivoted.”
But changing lanes in such a rapidly changing market comes with risks, said one OpenAI investor. They said OpenAI risks being left in a “no-man’s land” as Google competes fiercely for chatbot users and Anthropic colludes with companies.
Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle
