OpenAI wants to kill the Chatbot it invented and turn it into a Superapp

OpenAI has nearly 1 billion ChatGPT users. Most of them use it for free. This is the problem the company is trying to solve before going public.

the plan, I mentioned by Financial Times Based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, the goal is to turn ChatGPT into a super app — a single interface for programming, task automation, image creation, and partner apps. The redesign is internally codenamed ‘Aria’.

OpenAI has not confirmed the codename or firm launch date. The changes to the website and mobile applications are expected to begin implementation in the coming weeks.

The goal is to have an assistant that is “able to help you with everything in your life, whether it’s personally or at work,” Thibaut Sotio, who previously ran Codex and now leads all of OpenAI’s core products and platform, told the Financial Times that the goal is to have an assistant that is “able to help you with everything in your life, whether it’s personally or at work.”

“Chat is dead,” a senior OpenAI employee told. Financial Times— not exactly what you’d expect to hear from the company that built its empire on a product called ChatGPT

WeChat did it. Everyone tried.

The super app idea has a model: WeChat, Tencent’s do-it-all app, which started as a messaging platform in 2011 and now handles… 45 billion messages daily For 1.4 billion monthly users. WeChat Pay and Alipay process 40 trillion dollars In annual transactions. Chinese users book doctors, pay taxes, and book their flights without ever leaving the app. It stopped being a social network a long time ago and turned into a software infrastructure in its own right.

Elon Musk has been chasing this model since he bought Twitter in 2022. He has publicly said he wants X to be the Western WeChat. In 2025, he launched the encrypted messaging service XChat and X Money payments, the latter through Visa partnership For peer-to-peer transfers. X has between 500 and 600 million users. The ambition of payments has not taken off. Meta has been experimenting with it with Messenger bots in 2016 and WhatsApp payments for years. It also didn’t stick.

OpenAI’s pitch is different. It is not an attempt to build a social network, but rather it can be said that it is a failed experiment that began and ended with Sora. Instead, it’s about starting with a platform that people already use for work, and making that platform do more of the work.

A Codex agent can write, debug, and deploy programs through a script prompt. ChatGPT Proxy, It was launched in July 2025It can browse the web, run applications, and place orders independently. workspace agents, Released in April 2026Run a continuous, multi-step workflow within Slack and other enterprise tools.

This is the stack that is combined by OpenAI into a single interface.

Underwriting mathematics

OpenAI’s annual revenue exceeds $20 billion. Business customers account for 40% – and the majority of Codex users pay, unlike the majority of ChatGPT users who don’t. A year ago, OpenAI was “swinging for the fences” while Anthropic was “making money first,” Jenny Xiao, a partner at Lyoness Capital and a former OpenAI researcher, told the Financial Times that a year ago, OpenAI was “swinging for the fences” while Anthropic was “making money first.” “Now, the two are converging, because both are trying to target an IPO, and investors care more about money than dreams,” she added.

Anthropy is direct pressure. Crossed by Claude Code $2.5 billion in annual revenue by early 2026 — faster than any enterprise software product before it — and enterprises now represent nearly 80% of Anthropic’s total sales. They also appear to have beaten OpenAI at the IPO game, as they have officially begun the IPO process in secret presentation Draft Form S-1 filed with the SEC last week. OpenAI is now playing catch-up, Deposit confidentially for its IPO today.

“When we have AGI, I don’t think there will be as many distinct brands,” Alex Empiricus, head of enterprise products at OpenAI, told the Financial Times where he thinks this will end. “Maybe there will be one entity that I can talk to that can do everything I need.” OpenAI is also acquiring Python tool maker Astral to integrate developer tools directly into Codex. The IPO is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026.