OpenAI faces intensified rivalry after former Google staff reveals unreleased chatbot and Anthropic's Claude Code surge

Former OpenAI employee Tibo Sutiu, who previously worked on Google’s AI team, claimed that Google developed an internal chatbot called LMChat with capabilities similar to ChatGPT a year before OpenAI released its model. According to Sutiu, Google halted public deployment of the system out of concern that a conversational AI could undermine its search business, and he left Google for OpenAI in July 2024.

At the same time, Anthropic’s programming assistant Claude Code has accelerated the company’s revenue growth, pushing its valuation close to a trillion dollars and narrowing the gap with OpenAI’s own coding tool, Codex. Industry analysts note that competition in generative AI is shifting from consumer‑focused chatbots to developer‑oriented tools that improve productivity, prompting both OpenAI and Anthropic to expand enterprise offerings and adjust pricing strategies.