Sam Altman touts ChatGPT growth as OpenAI nears $100 billion funding

As OpenAI faces growing pressure from rival Anthropic’s improved coding tools, CEO Sam Altman tells employees and investors that his company is riding its share of the momentum.

Altman told OpenAI employees on Friday that the company’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, is “back to over 10% monthly growth,” according to an internal Slack message viewed by CNBC. Altman also said that OpenAI is preparing to release “an updated Chat model” this week.

More than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, but Google and Anthropic are making headway. OpenAI declared a “code red” for developing ChatGPT in December and temporarily suspended several projects to focus on that effort.

Altman said in his message on Friday that OpenAI’s coding product, Codex, is up about 50% from a week ago. Codex is in direct competition with Anthropic’s Claude Rules, which saw a wave of adoption last year.

OpenAI launches a new Codex modelGPT‑5.3-Codex was released last week and also a standalone application for users Apple computers. Codex’s growth has been “crazy,” Altman said, according to the internal message.

“This was a great week,” Altman wrote.

It was also a contentious week.

Altman and other senior executives social media Responding to scrolls from Anthropic, which ran Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI’s decision to run ads on ChatGPT. In a post on

OpenAI will officially begin testing ads on ChatGPT on Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. Last month, the company announced that ads would be clearly labeled, appear below chatbot responses, and would not influence ChatGPT’s responses.

OpenAI expects ads to account for less than half of its revenue over the long term, the person said. The digital advertising market has long been dominated by Google and Meta. Amazon It has become a bigger player in recent years.

Altman and CFO Sarah Friar have been pitching investors on OpenAI’s growth story as the company tries to close a $100 billion fundraising round, sources tell CNBC.

In private meetings, executives emphasize OpenAI’s strength with consumers, growing enterprise business and computing reach, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the conversations are private.

OpenAI is distributing charts as part of the discussions. A chart shows Codex eating into Claude Code’s market share based on internal data, according to a screenshot seen by CNBC.

OpenAI expects fundraising talks to heat up in the next two weeks, one person said. OpenAI closed a $41 billion round in March that included $30 billion from SoftBank and $11 billion from other investors.

As CNBC previously reported, the current funding round could be completed in two parts. The first will include capital Besides Microsoft and Nvidia Amazonis in talks to invest up to $50 billion in the company. Other contributions from participants such as SoftBank, which is discussing putting in another $30 billion, will follow.