OpenAI Beefs Up Staff to Take on Claude

OpenAI is reportedly planning to nearly double its staffing levels before the year’s end.

That’s according to a report Saturday (March 21) from the Financial Times (FT), which noted that this effort is happening as the artificial intelligence startup is stepping up its focus on business customers as it takes on rival Anthropic, developer of the Claude platform.

OpenAI hopes to expand its workforce from around 4,500 people to roughly 8,000, the report said, citing two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

Sources said the new hires would chiefly work in areas including product development, engineering, research and sales, while OpenAI also plans to recruit more workers devoted to helping companies better use its tools.

The report added that OpenAI has leased a new office in San Francisco, giving it more than 1 million square feet of real estate with plans to add around 12 employees per day this year.

Businesses that are purchasing AI products for the first time are going with Anthropic at three times the rate of OpenAI, the FT added, citing credit card data from payments startup Ramp.

The report added that an OpenAI spokesperson disputed these numbers, saying it was “insane” to think that Ramp’s credit card data could be used to determine market share.

“It’s a bit like saying global lemon sales can be calculated based on my kid’s lemonade stand,” the spokesperson said. “Large enterprise clients do not pay for multimillion dollar contracts with a credit card. And they likely don’t even use Ramp.”

As covered here last week, OpenAI is reportedly in the middle of a reset, setting aside various side projects to focus on business customers.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of applications, said in a message to employees, per The Wall Street Journal. “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.”

The Journal later reported that Simo is also leading a project aimed at combining OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, Codex coding platform and browser into a desktop “super app,” as it moves to make ChatGPT more central to how people use their computers.

Both efforts, PYMNTS wrote last week, suggest that the company’s super app plan is not “an isolated product tweak” but “is part of a broader effort to narrow priorities, unify execution and turn OpenAI into a more disciplined commercial platform.”

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