Senior OpenAI executive Fidji Simo told staffers last week that the company needed to "refocus on business customers and cut down on side quests that were becoming a distraction."
Why the urgency? Anthropic is eating OpenAI's enterprise lunch. Axios published a chart (based on corporate spend data from Ramp) showing that among new corporate AI customers, Anthropic has grown from capturing ~40% of new enterprise business in early December, to ~50% in mid-January, to more than 73% in late February.
OpenAI responded with two moves in a single week. First, Sam Altman announced the company is developing its own version of Claude Cowork — an AI agent that automates white-collar tasks.
Second, OpenAI announced it will acquire Astral, the startup behind three of the Python ecosystem's most widely adopted open-source tools: uv (dependency management), Ruff (linting and formatting), and ty (type checking). Astral's team is joining OpenAI's Codex group — which has tripled its user base since January to over 2 million weekly active users.
Elon Musk's xAI is deploying engineers directly to prospective corporate clients' offices — a white-glove sales approach aimed at winning enterprise business away from OpenAI and Anthropic. Bloomberg reported the strategy already landed payments company Shift4, which is phasing out ChatGPT in favor of Grok. (They're keeping Claude for coding.)
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