This follows reports that CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” inside the company in early December, halting side projects and pulling teams into a faster development sprint. 

The urgency was linked to Google’s latest innovations, which had placed Gemini 3 at the top of key performance rankings across reasoning, coding and multimodal tasks.

OpenAI says GPT-5.2 brings stronger general intelligence, better coding results, and far longer context handling. The company believes these improvements will help users complete more demanding work, particularly tasks that involve spreadsheets, complex documents, and project-heavy workflows. 

Interestingly, the new model stretches to handle up to a million tokens, a big difference from the previous model.

Google has been keen to highlight what Gemini 3 is capable of across text, audio, images and video, and analysts say its tight integration with Workspace and Android gives it an advantage with corporate users. 

Even with that, Altman played down the internal panic when he spoke on CNBC, saying: “Gemini 3 has had less of an impact on our metrics than we feared.” Google has not responded to requests for comment.

OpenAI is rolling out GPT-5.2 in three versions: Instant for quick responses, Thinking for slower but more reasoned answers, and Pro for enterprise-level performance. Paid ChatGPT users will receive them first. The company also states it will continue to support GPT-5.1, GPT-5 and GPT-4.1 on its API, giving developers more flexibility.

Away from the technical competition, OpenAI is also moving into entertainment. Disney has confirmed a $1 billion investment in the company and will allow its Sora video generator to use characters and worlds from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel. 

This is one of the largest licensing deals yet between Hollywood and an AI firm, and it sets up OpenAI as a direct partner in digital content production. Microsoft, still OpenAI’s biggest backer with about $13 billion committed since 2019, continues to host the company’s models on Azure.

Industry forecasts show spending on cloud-based AI services is expected to rise sharply, with Gartner estimating it will exceed $723 billion next year. Many companies are already relying on GPT models for coding assistance, document processing and data insights. According to OpenAI, enterprise usage has climbed roughly 40% in the past year.

However, regulators in the US and Europe are examining safety standards, competition risks and copyright issues, with Disney’s licensing deal likely to draw even closer attention.

In a series of posts on X, Musk alleged that Apple’s approach to curating and promoting apps leaves no realistic path for AI competitors to surpass OpenAI in visibility. 

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” he wrote.

Musk’s anger goes beyond rankings. He criticised Apple for leaving his apps, Grok and X, out of the “Must Have” section despite their strong performance. “Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?” he asked.

Apple has yet to respond to the accusations, and Elon Musk has not provided evidence to substantiate his claims. According to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT currently leads the “Top Free Apps” list in the U.S., Grok is in fifth place, and Google’s Gemini is 57th.

The issue comes against the backdrop of Apple’s ties with OpenAI. The two companies entered a partnership in June 2024 that embeds ChatGPT directly into iPhones, iPads, and Macs through Siri and system-wide tools. 

With iOS 26, Apple plans to introduce “Apple Intelligence,” which will integrate GPT-5 into core functions like Siri, Image Playground, and writing assistance, a move that raises ChatGPT’s visibility.

Regulators have already been pointing to Apple’s control over its App Store as bias. Earlier this year, a U.S. judge ruled that the company breached a court injunction arising from its issue with Fortnite creator Epic Games, and referred the matter for possible criminal contempt proceedings. 

In Europe, the EU fined Apple €500 million for restricting app developers from directing users to cheaper deals outside the App Store, a violation of the Digital Markets Act. In the United States, the Department of Justice has an ongoing case accusing Apple of monopolising the iPhone ecosystem.

Musk has yet to file a formal lawsuit, but his public statements show he is preparing for a high-profile challenge in court. 

Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who co-founded OpenAI’s Zurich office and also previously worked at Google DeepMind, have officially exited OpenAI and joined Meta to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). 

Their departure is a change in the balance of power, especially in the European AI research space, where Zurich has become a strategic outpost for some of the most advanced work in machine learning.

Their recruitment is part of Meta’s massive, under-the-radar goal to take over AGI development. At the centre of this is Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, a unit granted deep access to the company’s compute infrastructure and charged with building AI models that can rival or even surpass human reasoning.

It’s a pivot that founder Mark Zuckerberg is not leaving to chance.

Multiple reports now point to Zuckerberg taking a personal lead in poaching efforts, bypassing HR and headhunting directly via WhatsApp. He’s allegedly coordinating efforts through a “Recruiting Party” group chat and following up with private dinners in his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. The approach is unconventional but it’s starting to yield results.

One of the most headline-grabbing wins so far is the $14.3 billion investment Meta recently made in Scale AI. The deal gave Meta a 49% stake in the data-labeling company and also brought on board Alexandr Wang, Scale’s 28-year-old founder and CEO, to lead its superintelligence vision. 

The investment values Scale at $29 billion and ranks among Meta’s most expensive strategic plays since acquiring WhatsApp.

Still, the road hasn’t been smooth. Meta has failed to secure OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, both of whom have taken off in new directions. 

Sutskever is now heading up Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a stealth startup focused on developing safe AGI, while Schulman has joined another secretive firm led by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Their departures from OpenAI hint at ideological rifts and the growing splintering of high-level AI talent.

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been publicly dismissive of Zuckerberg’s charm offensive. In a recent podcast with his brother Jack, Altman quipped, “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers].”

But the facts on the ground are changing fast. The exodus of top researchers, Meta’s multibillion-dollar bets, and Zuckerberg’s visible sense of urgency all point to a conclusion that the competition is just starting and Meta has no intention of staying behind.

With compensation packages rumoured to exceed $100 million for senior hires, Analysts are bothered about market distortion and the ethical implications of consolidating so much power within a handful of firms. 

Meta’s open-source LLaMA models may have generated buzz, but many insiders acknowledge the company has lagged behind rivals like OpenAI and Google in performance and adoption.

The company seems to be correcting that, not just with money, but with a structural overhaul that places AGI development at the centre of its future.