OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted in an interview that the company was previously "far behind" Anthropic's Claude Code in the programming agent field, and that allocating resources to compete directly was seen internally as "like a crazy kamikaze mission," with the team's general consensus being that "such a comeback would never succeed." According to third-party data, in September 2025 Codex's weekly active users were only 5% of Claude Code's; after the desktop version launched in February 2026, the gap narrowed, with Codex's weekly active users rising from about 3 million in early April to over 7 million by July 14 and surpassing 10 million by the end of July, bringing the total weekly active users for both products to 10 million. Claude Code's annualized revenue surpassed $2.5 billion in February 2026, while Codex just crossed $1 billion in January 2026. OpenAI expanded programming reasoning-related computing power by about 100 times from the beginning of the year to July, temporarily putting other product experiences like writing and conversation "on hold." OpenAI shut down multiple business lines: the video generation product Sora was ceased in March, despite a $1 billion collaboration with Disney in progress; the independent browser product Atlas was cut just 9 months after its launch. Codex offered nearly unlimited quota resets, averaging a reset every 9 days in some months and every 3 days in July, with actual model cost per