By Berber Jin
OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop "superapp," a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.
Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company's sales team market the new product. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company's computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.
The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn't always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.
OpenAI is seeking to focus on creating so-called "agentic" AI capabilities within the new superapp, in which artificial-intelligence systems can work autonomously on a user's computer to carry out a variety of tasks, including writing software and analyzing data, according to OpenAI.
"We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts," Simo shared in an internal note with employees Thursday. "That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want."
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Top executives including Chief Executive Sam Altman, Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, and Simo have spent the last few weeks reviewing OpenAI's product portfolio and looking at areas to deprioritize, The Wall Street Journal reported. In an all-hands meeting last week, Simo told employees they couldn't afford to be distracted by "side quests" given Anthropic's rapid success winning over enterprise and coding customers. She said the company was very much acting as if it were under a "code red."
OpenAI is in a business battle with Anthropic to increase sales from companies looking to buy AI tools that boost productivity for their employees. Selling to enterprises wasn't an initial focus for OpenAI, but the company has since renewed its efforts after seeing the breakout success of Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork products. Both startups are considering public listings as soon as the end of the year and are racing to meet ambitious revenue growth targets outlined to investors.
An OpenAI spokesperson saidthe new "superapp" will enable teams inside OpenAI to work more closely together, and help the research division focus its efforts around improving one central product. Over the coming months, the company expects to add new "agentic" capabilities within its Codex app so it can help with productivity-related tasks beyond coding before merging ChatGPT and the Atlas browser into the superapp as well. The mobile ChatGPT app will remain unchanged.
OpenAI's organizational structure grew complicated due in part to the myriad products that it announced last year, including its video-generator Sora and a new hardware device.
"This is an opportunity to combine the strongest AI consumer app and brand with the strongest agentic app and really leverage our consumer scale to give agentic capabilities to everyone," she wrote.
Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 19:31 ET (23:31 GMT)
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