Enterprise Will Be a Top OpenAI Priority In 2026, Sam Altman Tells Editors at NYC Lunch

OpenAI’s CEO says the company wants to sell to businesses, also fields an Oppenheimer question.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a room full of editors and news CEOs this week that OpenAI will prioritize selling AI to businesses in 2026.

Altman lunched at Rosemary’s Midtown with leaders from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other top national publications on Monday. The conversation, wide ranging and at times unwieldy, featured a charming and disarming Altman speaking candidly about himself, his business, and plans for the coming year. He even fielded a question about whether he felt like Oppenheimer from New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Altman’s plans for OpenAI’s enterprise push was the biggest revelation from the lunch, details of which multiple people with knowledge of the discussion relayed to me. Under Altman, OpenAI has excelled at building consumer products, with ChatGPT approaching 900 million weekly users. But the company has faced fierce competition when selling its AI models to businesses, primarily from Anthropic, which is leading the enterprise AI market.

At the lunch, Altman made clear that selling to enterprises was a massive OpenAI priority, and mentioned that it was an application problem, not a training problem, that the company needed to solve. Altman was straightforward about OpenAI’s need to build better products for enterprises and his intent to fast track them.

For OpenAI, growing its enterprise business could be the surest way to scale revenue as it pursues one of history’s great infrastructure buildouts. Enterprise AI is the fastest growing software category in history, expected to bring in $37.5 billion next year, according to Gartner, up from almost zero in 2022.

Should OpenAI make inroads in the category, it could more easily justify new funding rounds and better support its push to build $1.4 trillion of computing infrastructure in the coming years. Notably, OpenAI’s October agreement with Microsoft, which added some distance between the companies, gives it greater leeway to build for enterprises.

Altman also addressed the ‘Code Red’ within OpenAI following the emergence of Google’s Gemini as a competitor. Altman has said Google’s AI model surpassed OpenAI’s GPT models in some areas, but at the lunch he pushed back on the notion that the latest Gemini model was an existential threat to OpenAI. The company has been through multiple code reds in its history, Altman said, and this one would end soon. He also downplayed the standard benchmarks, saying that, while important, they’re easily gamed.

Finally, New Yorker Editor David Remnick asked Altman if he felt like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the first nuclear weapons project. In response, Altman suggested that while the nuclear bomb was developed and dropped soon after, artificial intelligence was something that is going to transform the course of human history over a longer period of time. Altman insisted he didn’t feel alarmed, as he might have if working on a nuclear weapon, but instead felt the weight of responsibility working on the powerful technology.

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