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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly declared a “code red.”
• Google once did the same amid the rise of ChatGPT.
• While Altman once quipped that he tried not to spend much time thinking about competitors, those days appear to be over.

Two “code red” alerts — the first from a veteran tech giant worried about a buzzy AI upstart, the second from the AI upstart after the tech giant gained ground.

What a difference three years can make.

News of a recent Sam Altman memo to OpenAI employees, first reported by The Information, is reverberating around the tech world and highlighting the competitive heat it’s facing as Google narrows the gap in the AI race.

On Monday, Altman reportedly told OpenAI employees in an internal Slack memo that he was issuing a “code red” and that the company would be putting more resources into ChatGPT and delaying other products as a result.

Altman’s memo illustrates just how much the AI race has changed. In 2022, Google’s management issued its own “code red” in the wake of ChatGPT’s launch, a moment that illustrated in sharp relief just how far behind the search giant was in the AI race despite financing the breakthrough research that paved the way for AI’s development.

Three years later, it’s clear that OpenAI’s throne is under threat. Here are some of the pressure points it’s facing as Google nips at its heels.

Google is catching up

The elephant in the OpenAI room is Google’s Gemini 3 AI model, which debuted to widespread praise.

The model’s capabilities demonstrated that Google is no longer far behind in the AI race. It’s not just OpenAI that’s unnerved, either. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market cap, recently found itself defending its AI chips after a report about Google’s own chip progress.

The search giant said in November that Gemini had more than 650 million monthly active users, a large increase from the 450 million such users it reported in July. In comparison, OpenAI has said nearly 800 million weekly active users.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently said that he was ditching ChatGPT in favor of Gemini 3 because of Gemini’s “insane” improvement.

“Holy shit,” Benioff wrote on X last month. “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”

Last month, Google launched “Nano Banana Pro,” its AI image generator, showcasing hyper-realistic images that users quickly used to imagine tech CEOs hanging out together or pretend famous Thanksgiving dinner table guests.

Altman’s “code red,” according to The Information’s report, specifically mentions Gemini 3 and teases a coming OpenAI model that it says tested “ahead” of Google’s flagship model, as well as mentions prioritizing OpenAI’s Imagegen image generation model for ChatGPT users.

Google’s advertising cash cow can fund its AI — while OpenAI faces a $1.4 trillion bill

The AI game is an expensive one, and Google has the advantage of being a cash-generating advertising juggernaut.

Sure, Google plans to spend between $91 billion and $93 billion this year on cap ex, much of which is going toward AI costs. But it also brought in $100 billion in revenue in just the last quarter alone — $74.18 billion of which came from its advertising business.

And unlike OpenAI, Google can leverage its massive size for a full-stack advantage, allowing it to control AI development from research to chip manufacturing to its in-house cloud, which hosts everything.

Meanwhile, some on Wall Street have raised concerns about OpenAI’s mounting AI spending commitments, which tally at least $1.4 trillion over the next eight years. In response, Altman has said OpenAI is on track to bring in $20 billion in revenue this year, and expects its annualized revenue to grow to hundreds of billions in the coming years.

But OpenAI is still figuring out its own ads business — the launch of which could be delayed by Altman’s “code red,” according to The Information.

OpenAI has a head start — but Google has a platform advantage

OpenAI hasn’t squandered its head start, and it’s landed some major wins this year.

In recent months, OpenAI has made significant plays into other industries, including social media with Sora, its TikTok-esque AI video generation app. In a direct shot at Google Chrome, OpenAI also launched Atlas, its own web browser.

And it sounds like OpenAI has more up its sleeve as it battles the bottleneck of lining up enough compute and energy to power its developments.

OpenAI executives have said compute constraints are holding back other initiatives, like making ChatGPT Pulse, a personalized update feature within the chatbot for Pro users, available to everyone. Last week, Bill Peebles, OpenAI’s head of Sora, announced that free users would face significant cuts in the number of videos they could generate per day.

ChatGPT also remains synonymous with AI — not unlike Google and online search. That will likely help continue to drive app downloads and usage and could also stave off Google’s attempts to convince users to switch to Gemini or Google’s other AI-infused products.

But humans are creatures of habit, and many already use a Google product or service everyday — a platform advantage that the tech giant is already utilizing to siphon away ChatGPT users.

Silicon Valley’s history is built on startup disrupting the status quo.

Now, with OpenAI (smartly) looking over its shoulder, we get to watch the AI race heat up as Google, a former startup, gets its AI legs and hits its stride.

For OpenAI, it’s a reminder that tech giants can put up quite a fight when facing the prospect of being disrupted — and sometimes, can turn the tables.

“I try not to think about competitors too much,” Altman said last May before critiquing Google’s aesthetic.

It sounds like those days are gone.

• Torben Severson has departed Amazon after 17 years to join OpenAI.
• Severson will serve as Vice President and Head of Global Business Development at OpenAI.
• OpenAI has hired over 400 employees in the past year, including a handful of former Amazon staffers.

A top executive announced on Monday that he had departed Amazon after 17 years to join OpenAI.

Torben Severson, who served as chief of staff to Amazon’s retail CEO Doug Herrington, said in a post on LinkedIn that he left the mega-retailer in October. Severson will now serve as Vice President, Head of Global Business Development at Sam Altman’s AI company.

“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson wrote in his LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Severson’s new role. Severson and a spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

News of the move was first reported by The Information.

OpenAI’s global business development team is responsible for building out the company’s outside partnerships and commercial strategy.

In early November, OpenAI and AWS announced a $38 billion partnership, which gives Altman’s company access to “hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.”

Severson spent much of his time at Amazon in business development, working on partnerships with other companies, including warrant deals. Most recently, he became Herrington’s technical advisor, a highly coveted role that involves joining the CEO in nearly every meeting and call.

He is one of more than a dozen former Amazon employees to join OpenAI over the past year, according to data from LiveData Technologies, a workforce tracking database. Over the past year, OpenAI has hired more than 400 workers, the database shows.

Do you work for OpenAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• Citadel, Balyasny, ExodusPoint, and more all made money in November.
• Big-name funds battled a choppy equities market, though stocks bounced in the second half of the month.
• Many hedge funds outperformed the modest 0.1% gain in November by the S&P 500 index.

Hedge funds’ biggest names had a solid November despite an early-month sell-off of hot tech stocks.

Citadel, Balyasny, and ExodusPoint all made money in the month, people close to the managers told Business Insider.

Miami-based Citadel, run by billionaire Ken Griffin, was up 1.4% in its flagship Wellington fund. The fund has made 8.3% for the year. The manager’s Tactical Trading fund, which combines the firm’s quant and flesh-and-blood stockpickers, is up 16.3% in 2025 after 2.6% gain last month.

The $30 billion Balyasny continued its strong year with a 2.5% gain in November. The manager is now up 15.3% in 2025. ExodusPoint pushed its year-to-date returns to 15.6% with a 1.2% bump in November.

These firms and many other multistrategy managers outperformed the S&P 500 last month; the index gained just 0.1% thanks to an early-month sell-off of tech stocks that was partially reversed by strong earnings from chipmaker Nvidia and solid iPhone sales by Apple.

The index for the year has still made more than 16% in 2025, which is greater than many funds’ year-to-date gains.

The firms below declined to comment. More performance figures will be added to the table and the article as they are learned.

• Ukraine used an interceptor drone to take out a Russian Shahed carrying an air-to-air missile.
• Wild Hornets, a Ukrainian company that makes the Sting interceptor drone, confirmed the incident.
• The missile-armed Shahed appears to be Russia’s attempt to counter Ukrainian aircraft.

A Ukrainian defense manufacturer said Monday that its interceptor took down a Russian drone armed with an air-to-air missile, an unusual configuration signaling a new battlefield tactic.

Wild Hornets, a defense-tech firm making drones for the Ukrainian military, said that the Darknode battalion of Kyiv’s 412th Nemesis Brigade used its “Sting” interceptor drone to shoot down a Russian Shahed carrying a Soviet-era air-to-air missile.

Alex Roslin, the foreign support coordinator for Wild Hornets, told Business Insider that the recent engagement marks the first time a Sting interceptor has taken down a Shahed-type drone carrying an air-to-air missile.

Russia’s Shahed-style strike drones are typically armed with explosive warheads alone and are designed to dive toward a target before detonating on impact; these one-way attack drones haven’t been widely spotted carrying any external munitions.

Wild Hornets said in a statement that Russia appears to be using the air-to-air missiles to counter Ukrainian helicopters, one of the tools that Kyiv has relied on to intercept Shahed-type drones.

Neither Russia’s defense ministry nor its US embassy responded to a request for comment.

Video footage of the engagement, captured from the perspective of the Sting interceptor drone, appears to show a propeller-driven Geran-2 — the Russian variant of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 — carrying the missile.

Wild Hornets identified the equipped weapon as the R-60, a short-range guided missile with a 10-kilometer (6-mile) range developed by the Soviet Union for fighter jets. The missile, which entered service in the early 1970s, has extensive combat experience and has been deployed in various Middle East conflicts.

Sergey Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian military expert, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that the incident marks the first time an R-60 missile has been detected on a Shahed, adding that the combination “is designed to destroy helicopters and tactical aviation aircraft that hunt Shaheds.”

Beskrestnov shared photos purporting to show the wreckage of a downed Shahed and the missile. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the imagery.

Ukraine has increasingly relied on aircraft, including fighter jets and helicopters, to shoot down Russian drones. Adding missiles to the drones may be Moscow’s attempt to suppress these air defenses. The add-ons could reduce effectiveness, though, by putting limits on overall payload capacity.

It is not the first time in the war that drones have been armed with missiles. Ukrainian naval drones equipped with surface-to-air missiles have, for instance, shot down Russian aircraft over the Black Sea. The adaptation was made in response to increased Russian combat air patrols.

But the missile-armed Shahed marks a new development for Russia as it seeks to gain an advantage over Ukraine in what officials describe as a cat-and-mouse game of defense technology between the two sides.

Lt. Col. Yurii Myronenko, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense for innovation, told Business Insider last month that Russia has already been trying to hit Ukrainian aircraft and helicopters midair with Shaheds.

Myronenko, a former drone unit commander, said Russia is testing new deep-strike weapons, including modified Shaheds. He did not mention air-to-air missiles, though.

Facing a growing Russian drone threat, Ukraine in recent months has turned to interceptor drones like Wild Hornets’ Sting for cheap air defense solutions.

The Sting costs roughly $2,500. Wild Hornets said in November that Ukrainian forces can use the interceptor drones to take down more than 100 Shaheds — estimated to cost between $20,000 and $70,000 — in a single night.

On Sunday, the company said Sting interceptors had taken down new Geran-3 drones — Russia’s jet-powered Shahed variant — for the first time during an attack the previous night.

• Parker Henry is married to New England Patriots tight end Hunter Henry.
• She met him while studying nursing and married the same year she graduated.
• Today, they have two kids, and one on the way.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Parker Henry. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When my husband, Hunter Henry, signed with the New England Patriots in 2021, I was skeptical about moving to Boston. Yet after we arrived, I was surprised that Massachusetts reminded me of Arkansas, where Hunter and I grew up. The weather is similar, and the people in both places are so loyal.

We bought a house in Massachusetts, near the stadium, and both our children were born here. Because of that, Massachusetts feels so much like home. We have a great community, both within the team and outside it.

We’ve always returned to Arkansas, where we own another house, in the offseason. Now that my son is in preschool, that’s getting harder. We don’t want to take him away from the school that he loves. I’m also pregnant, due in March, and we’re planning to stay in New England year-round for the first time. In the future, we’ll play it by ear each season.

I try not to think about moving for Hunter’s job

Where we call home could change if Hunter were traded. That’s one of those things you try not to think about, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t on my mind. We’ve been very, very fortunate to be in New England for five years.

I remind myself that worrying won’t change anything. It’s the reality of the NFL that you can be uprooted at any time. Ultimately, whether it’s Massachusetts, Arkansas, or somewhere else, I know home is where your people are.

Before kids, I worked as an RN while Hunter played

Hunter and I started dating when we were at the University of Arkansas. He was a year ahead of me, and I was still completing my nursing degree when he was drafted to the Chargers (who were first based in San Diego, then Las Vegas).

We had a long-distance relationship before getting married in 2018. That was also the year I graduated and started working as a labor and delivery nurse. Working as a nurse for two and a half years gave me a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

I stopped working when we moved to Massachusetts, and I found out I was expecting our son. Now, my purpose and fulfillment come from raising our soon-to-be three kids. I don’t think I’m done with nursing, though; I joke that I’m going to become a school nurse to follow the kids.

Traveling to away games can be difficult, so we watch from home

The kids and I go to all the home games. If Hunter’s traveling, things are more complicated. We can’t travel or even stay with the team, so I need to figure out our flights and accommodations. The team always flies home after the game, no matter how late it ends, so Hunter gets home before the kids and me if we travel to away games.

Because of that, we usually only go if we have friends or family in the city where he’s playing. I’d rather be at home to greet him after the game and spend the next day together.

Instead, my son and I watch every away game. He still naps from 1 to 3 p.m. every day, so sometimes we have to negotiate that he can watch the second half if it’s an early game.

Being an NFL wife isn’t all glitz and glam

The fascination with NFL wives and girlfriends is funny to me. We’re just human beings, trying to wake up and get through the week. The glitz and glam isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re handling the mental load of running a home, getting the kids to school, and packing lunches.

Hunter has no idea what’s going on at home during football season. I rely on paid help, since we don’t have family living near us. It really does take a village.

I also recently got a Skylight calendar, which helps tremendously because Hunter can just glance at it and see if our son has preschool that day, or if we have an event coming up. My son loves the calendar too. Now that he’s older, he wants to know everything about Hunter’s schedule. He likes seeing where Daddy’s traveling, when he’ll be home, and what time the games are, and the calendar helps him feel connected, even when Hunter is on the road.

• Omnicom recently closed a $9 billion acquisition of IPG, creating the largest ad agency company.
• In an interview with Business Insider, Omnicom’s leadership team outlined its strategy.
• CEO John Wren said Omnicom’s new scale will help it strike better commercial terms.

Madison Avenue’s center of gravity is shifting.

Omnicom is now officially the world’s largest ad agency holding company, thanks to its $9 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group, which closed Friday.

The combination brings together creative and media agencies, health marketing specialists, and production studios. They are all set to be underpinned by data from its Acxiom data-management company and Omni, which the company describes as its advanced intelligence platform.

The agency mega-merger is also set to bring about more than $750 million in cost savings, including 4,000 job cuts related to the transaction, the company said Monday.

Omnicom chairman and CEO John Wren told Business Insider in an interview on Monday that the merger would give the company fresh agility and scale.

“We will be in a position, for the foreseeable future, to be able to create the best commercial terms for our clients,” Wren said. “Underpinning that is a platforms group powered by generative AI that will be far unmatchable unless you’re one of the big six tech companies.”

Announced in December, the stock-for-stock transaction was initially valued at about $13 billion, but closed at roughly $9 billion because both Omnicom and IPG’s shares fell in the months after.

Wren said Omnicom’s stock price is “set to correct very quickly because of all the benefits that we’re going to get” from the IPG acquisition.

Business Insider spoke with Wren and other members of the Omnicom leadership team to learn what the deal reveals about the health of the advertising business, an industry facing multiple competitive threats and the rise of new technologies, such as AI. They also shared why Omnicom clients and staff should feel exhilarated by the close of the deal, and how the ad group’s AI strategy differs from its competitors.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Business Insider: How would you characterize the current state of Madison Avenue? Some of the observers and analysts looking at this merger have said it doesn’t reflect an industry in a position of strength.

John Wren: In terms of where this is all headed, and why I think there is tremendous growth, is that with the improvements that are coming on board with technology, with the unique database that we’re going to be able to provide our employees for insights and knowledge, we’re going to get closer and closer to that holy grail of wanting to be paid based upon agreed KPIs and performance.

We get paid well when you, the client, do well, and we suffer when you suffer.

That’s where it’s moving toward.

Business Insider: A lot of the focus today has been on the job cuts related to the transaction. There have already been thousands of job cuts across IPG and Omnicom since the deal was first announced. How should current Omnicom employees feel about their job security going into 2026?

Wren: IPG was fairly aggressive throughout the first three quarters of 2025. Quite a bit of that was right-sizing them for some of the business casualties they had in the past.

I’ve never taken cuts lightly at all, because they affect not only the individual but the individual’s family. This is an acquisition, but our people approach it from a talent point of view, as if it were a merger of equals, where, if there were two people competing for one position, the best person won — not because they were Omnicom, they win by default.

We held very true to something I said very early on, that people who are generating revenue and creating ideas and growth for clients, their jobs were to be safe. In principle, I think we accomplished that. We did it pretty fairly between the two groups.

We’ve been planning for this and rather anxious about it, because we don’t want to leave employees with the impression that, oh, this is just going to be a rolling cut and uncertainties.

We’re trying to get as much of it done now —between today and December 15 — as is humanly possible and is correct. It’s principally over, so people can be secure, but it’s never quite finished because there’s ongoing stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the client, doesn’t have anything to do with the product, this has to do with us becoming faster and more efficient.

Troy Ruhanen, Omnicom Advertising CEO: This move, ultimately, has energized our staff and has energized our clients as they are able to see the full potential of what we can be as an organization.

Our staff feel they’re capable of being much more of a business partner to our clients, and our clients feel like they can trust us to complete the brand experience.

We’ve had a really good reaction already from our clients around this news and the capabilities we are bringing together and the places where we are going to demonstrate clear leadership.

Business Insider: It seems the ad industry has a “frenemy” relationship with AI. You’ve got no choice but to embrace it. CEOs are asking CMOs to figure out their AI strategies, and you can act as the consultant there. But AI also threatens to automate away many of the services that you once charged those CMOs for. How do you strike the right balance between those things, and what makes Omnicom AI’s strategy different from WPP and Publicis?

John Wren: Some of that we’re not going to disclose to you.

This technology probably has an immediate and serious impact on how we can become more efficient. Our current model, which has been morphing, is based on time and materials. As you’re eliminating manual types of functions or revitalizing them in some way, you’re going to lose some of that labor, but you’re going to become more expert.

We’re going to increasingly get more and more confident about our abilities to be paid for performance. In order to get there, the client’s KPIs have to be clearly articulated and explained, and we have to be certain that we can add value to that activity, which we believe we will.

But it’s going to be a journey. It’s not a light switch.

Business Insider: What separates you from an Accenture in this area?

John Wren: Our data is going to be better. Our insights as a result of that are going to be better. Our geography.

How do you add value to that? It’s our creative IP and what you do with that to enrich your at-the-moment data that differentiates you, and that’s where we are planning to be.

We’re servicing two-thirds of the leading companies in the world. I hope to expand that relationship with more. We provide services, but we also do a hell of a lot of observation in terms of who’s moving, at what pace.

We are constantly disrupting and trying to cannibalize ourselves so we are fit for purpose.

Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom chief technology officer: There are several factors that really differentiate us.

One is around the first-mover partnerships we established early on, as early as 2022, as it relates to generative AI. We are working side-by-side with the leading researchers within some of the largest technology companies in the world, looking at the advancements that they’re making. They’re asking us, what are the appropriate use cases for these research projects that they have within their labs. So, because we’re adopting the technology and we’re operationalizing that technology at great speed, we have the advantage over many of our competitors.

Our data, bar none, is the most elite dataset in the industry. On the buy side, the connected graph around identity for that dataset is the most robust and most comprehensively supported graph in the industry. Then our platform strategy, where computation really fuels creativity, is allowing us to create this neural network of commerce, of media, of creativity, using agentic AI to turn data into desire and desire into growth.

We can do it faster than any one of the competitors out there, whether they are direct competitors or adjacent competitors, like the management consultancies.