OpenAI Declares "Code Red" — And Takes Aim at Your Brain

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman sent an internal memo on Monday declaring a company-wide emergency and presumably ruining the holiday wind-down hopes of his faithful employees. OpenAI is hitting pause on advertising plans, delaying AI agents for health and shopping, and shelving a personal assistant called “Pulse.” All hands are being pulled back to one mission: making ChatGPT feel more personal, more intuitive, and more essential to your daily life.

The company says it wants the general quality, intelligence, and flexibility to improve, but I’d argue this is less about making the chatbot smarter, and more about making it stickier.

Google’s Gemini has been surging — monthly active users jumped from 450 million in July to 650 million in October. Industry leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff are calling it the best LLM on the market. OpenAI seems to feel the heat, and also seems to feel it doesn’t have the resources to keep building everything it wants all at once — it has to prioritize. Consider that when Altman was recently asked on a podcast how he plans to get to profitability, he grew exasperated. “Enough,” he said.

But here’s what struck me about the Code Red. While Gemini is supposedly surpassing ChatGPT in industry benchmarkes, I don’t think Altman is chasing benchmarks. He’s chasing the “toothbrush rule” — the Google standard for greenlighting new products that says a product needs to become an essential habit used at least three times a day. The memo specifically emphasizes “personalization features.” They want ChatGPT to feel like it knows you, so that you feel known, and can’t stop coming back to it.

I’ve been talking about AI distortion — the strange way these systems make us feel a genuine connection to what is, ultimately, a statistical pattern generator. That feeling isn’t a bug. It’s becoming the business model.

Facebook did this. Google did this. Now OpenAI is doing it: delaying monetization until the product is so woven into your life that you can’t imagine pulling away. Only then do the ads come.

Meanwhile, we’re living in a world where journalists have to call experts to verify whether a photo of Trump fellating Bill Clinton is real or AI-generated.

The image generators keep getting better, the user numbers keep climbing, and the guardrails remain an afterthought.

This is the AI industry in December 2025: a race to become indispensable.

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