Inside OpenAI’s Race to Catch Up to Claude Code

Sam Altman sits with his legs pretzeled in an office chair, staring deeply into the ceiling. To be fair, the new OpenAI headquarters—a temple of glass and blond wood in San Francisco’s Mission Bay—seems to invite this kind of contemplation. A kiosk behind reception holds booklets that describe the “Eras of AI” as if they were steps on the path to enlightenment. Posters along the stairs mark AI’s milestone victories, like the time thousands of humans watched on livestream as a machine beat a top-ranked esports team at Dota 2. In the hallways, researchers pass by in sacred merch. One shirt reads “Good research takes time.” Ideally, not too much.

Altman and I are in an enormous conference room. The question I put to him is about the AI coding revolution—and why OpenAI doesn’t seem to be leading it. Millions of software engineers have ...