The Morning Download: OpenAI Will Fight for Business Market

Good morning. OpenAI has engaged Anthropic in an all-out battle for the enterprise AI market. Get the popcorn, because this one is going to be good.

The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin reports that OpenAI will refocus its sprawling portfolio on the engineering and business markets. It will create a superapp that combines core products and stresses agentic AI, which is evolving quickly. Highlights from the WSJ’s exclusive story:

OpenAI is seeking to focus on creating so-called “agentic” AI capabilities within the new superapp, in which AI systems can work autonomously to carry out tasks such as writing software and analyzing data, the Journal said.

“We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts,” Chief of Applications Fidji Simo shared in an internal note with employees Thursday. “That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.”

• OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.
• Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and related organization changes, the Journal said.
• OpenAI executives are hoping that the pivot will “allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic,” the Journal said.
• The company also plans to acquire Astral, which makes tools for Python, Bloomberg reports. Astral members will join the team behind OpenAI’s Codex team.

Rival Anthropic has been on a tear, with models and agentic frameworks driving the success of Claude Code and Cowork, designed for broader usage. Anthropic revenue is soaring, and closing the gap with larger OpenAI. Both companies are expected to try to go public later this year.

OpenAI has built up a vast core of users in the consumer market, which is larger than the enterprise market but more dependent on advertising, an area where its efforts are still nascent. The enterprise market is driving revenue and it's open to innovation, especially in the area of AI agents.

The battle for AI coding is broader than just Anthropic and OpenAI.

Vibe-coder Cursor is building its own AI model. The company tells Bloomberg that Composer 2, designed to operate as an agent for extended coding tasks, is smaller and less expensive to use in part because it was trained exclusively on coding-related data. “It won’t help you do your taxes,” co-founder Adam Sanger tells Bloomberg.

Google goes all-in on ‘vibe-designing’—and one company is feeling it. Google's announcement that its Stitch UI design app was getting an “AI-native” upgrade, sent Figma shares down 11% this week, Fast Company reports. The software firm had soared on its late-July IPO debut, but fears this year that AI will upend the software industry have been chipping away at its valuation.

Jeff Bezos is building a $100 billion AI-powered manufacturing fund. The Amazon founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise $100 billion for a fund that would acquire manufacturing companies and use AI to accelerate their automation.

The vehicle is tied to Project Prometheus, a new startup building AI that can model and simulate the physical world. This AI has applications spanning aircraft design, robotics, and weather forecasting among other areas. Bezos was recently named co-CEO of the company, and the Journal reports he plans to deploy its technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of the fund's portfolio companies, a playbook some investment firms are already running in enterprise IT. 

AI war breaks out in a New York congressional race. AI companies have pledged roughly $265 million to super PACs ahead of this year's midterms, targeting lawmakers who back industry regulation. One of the campaign's clearest test cases according to the Journal is New York assemblyman Alex Bores. The candidate who sponsored an AI safety bill and has since faced $2 million in attack ads.

The twist. The attacks have raised his profile in a crowded Manhattan Democratic primary.

Publisher pulls novel over AI authorship concerns. Hachette Book Group has canceled publication of the horror novel "Shy Girl" after readers raised concerns on social media that it may have been written with AI assistance. Author Mia Ballard denied the allegations, saying she "did not personally use AI."

Servers with Nvidia chips were smuggled into China, U.S. indictment says. Employees of U.S. server maker Super Micro Computer helped smuggle machines with high-end Nvidia chips to China and used dummy devices to deceive an American inspector, according to a U.S. indictment unsealed Thursday. Super Micro said it placed co-founder and Senior Vice President Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw on leave after learning of his alleged role in the scheme.

Back to school: Students (and everyone else) love the food at UMass Amherst. The dining halls at UMass Amherst serve global cuisines to its more than 30,000 students good enough to draw comparisons to restaurants in the Michelin Guide—and they're open to the public ($12.50 for breakfast, $17 for lunch, $20 for dinner). Some 60 special events pack the calendar each year, but Halloween's Steak & Lobster dinner is the main event with some 15,000 live lobsters making an early-morning truck journey from the Gulf of Maine to Amherst. 

Truckers like their Tesla-semis.Truckers who drove it in pilot tests said they loved features including a centered driving position, faster charging and longer range for about $100,000 less than other battery-electric trucks, WSJ reports. The company is expected to deliver between 5,000 and 15,000 Semis in 2026.

We want to know what you feel about AI. No, not what you think about AI, but what you really feel about it. Create an emoji that expresses your AI sentiment and send it to us. We’ll publish the best ones in future newsletters.

Saudi Arabia’s oil officials are working frantically to project how high oil prices might go if the Iran war and its disruption of energy supplies doesn’t end soon—and they don’t like what they are seeing. The base case, several oil officials in the Gulf’s biggest producer said, is that prices could soar past $180 a barrel if the disruptions persist until late April. (WSJ)

President Trump made a reference to Pearl Harbor in front of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, when asked why he didn’t notify allies about the U.S.’s plan to attack Iran. “You don't want to signal too much," Trump said. “Who knows better about surprises than Japan? Hey, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” he said. (WSJ)

America’s biggest banks would be allowed to hold billions of dollars less in capital on their books under proposals unveiled Thursday, easing rules put in place after the 2008 financial crisis that were meant to help shield against meltdowns. (WSJ)

California lawmakers are moving to rename Chavez’s holiday ‘Farmworkers Day’ over claims the late labor-icon abused women and girls in the 1960s and ’70s. (WSJ)

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.