OpenAI is about to radically transform ChatGPT, and you won't recognize it anymore.

The turning point began in January 2026, when Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of applications, announced internally that OpenAI was considering integrating advertisements into ChatGPT. Three weeks later, the official launch of ChatGPT Ads for free accounts in the United States confirmed that Sam Altman’s company had changed its philosophy.The newly confirmed product strategy goes even further: a senior employee said that the cat is “dead”, and ChatGPT will be reworked over the coming weeks into a super app centered on AI agents and developer tools, including Codex, its paid coding product.

What remains of OpenAI’s Open?

In December 2015, OpenAI was founded with an explicit mission: to develop AI openly, freely share research and patents, and never be driven by the pursuit of profit. The first models (notably GPT-1 in 2018) did indeed have their weights published and their research papers accessible to everyone, in accordance with that commitment. The company was rightly presented as an ethical counterweight to the commercial ambitions of Google or Microsoft in this field.

This direction gradually eroded, not through a single decision but through a series of gradual shifts: the partial lockdown of GPT-2 in 2019 because it was deemed too dangerous (does that remind you of something?), the transition to a limited-profit structure that same year (with Microsoft’s first $1 billion investment), and then the refusal to publish the weights of GPT-4 in 2023. Elon Musk, a co-founder, himself sued OpenAI in 2024 for violating its founding charter. In 2026, the free version of ChatGPT has been displaying advertisements since February 9 in the United States; France is sure to follow soon, and the advertising network has reached $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks since the self-service advertising manager opened in May. Sam Altman, long opposed to advertising, has ultimately endorsed the model.

ChatGPT: a funnel to paid offerings or an advertising platform for free users?

The announced redesign is based on a precise logic: ChatGPT must become a gateway to OpenAI’s paid tools, particularly Codex, its software development product, whose revenue far exceeds that generated by a free user. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s core product and platform, described the objective: a personal agent capable of helping users “in every aspect of their life, professional or personal”. The move also entails abandoning side projects: the Sora video generator has been shut down, and product directors Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles left the company in April 2026.

This dual strategy, however, has created a tension that analysts have not failed to highlight: if free ChatGPT is a funnel to paid offerings, why simultaneously insert advertising that risks degrading the experience and discouraging conversion? OpenAI is targeting 2.5 billion in advertising revenue by the end of 2026 and 100 billion by 2030 from this lever alone, which assumes that the two models can coexist over the long term without harming one another. It is a wager that looks as much like an admission of uncertainty about the product’s true purpose as a deliberately pursued strategy.

Timing weighs heavily on these decisions. Anthropic filed its IPO paperwork on June 1, 2026. SpaceX (which has absorbed xAi) is listing on the Nasdaq on June 12.OpenAI must in turn demonstrate a credible path to profitability before its own listing on the markets, in a sector where competition has never been as intense. For European users, ChatGPT advertisements are scheduled in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea in the coming weeks, with expansion to the rest of Europe planned in the following months.

OpenAI is heading toward an IPO in a landscape where its most direct competitors have already positioned themselves on the markets. The promise of AI open to everyone, free and neutral has followed the usual path of technological ideals: less open source, more advertising, and a chat interface that the company’s own teams now describe as moribund.

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Source: Financial Times