By Timothy B. Lee
Publication Date: 2025-12-04 18:49:00
On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” in the face of rising competition.
The biggest threat was Google; monthly active users for Google’s Gemini chatbot grew from 450 million in July to 650 million in November (ChatGPT had 800 million weekly active users in October). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports, “OpenAI is also facing pressure from Anthropic, which is becoming popular among business customers.”
Google ratcheted up the pressure on OpenAI two weeks ago with the release of Gemini 3 models, which set new records on a number of benchmarks. The next week, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which achieved even higher scores on some of the same benchmarks.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to cover these new releases. I used to subject each new model to a battery of bespoke benchmarks and write about the results. But recent models have gotten good enough to easily solve most of these problems. They do still fail on…
