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.

Data from Appfigures shows that Sora recorded 627,000 iOS downloads in its first week, slightly ahead of ChatGPT’s 606,000 during its launch. About 45,000 of Sora’s installations came from Canada, with the rest from the United States. That means even if limited to the U.S. market, Sora would have achieved roughly 96% of ChatGPT’s launch performance.

Confirming the achievement, Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, said on X that the app reached a million downloads across platforms in under five days, making it “faster than ChatGPT, despite being invite-only.”

Within days of its release, Sora climbed to the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, overtaking other generative tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and xAI’s Grok. On its launch day, it recorded 56,000 downloads, peaking at 107,800 on October 1, according to Appfigures.

Despite its restricted rollout, Sora’s viral spread has been impossible to ignore. Across social media platforms, users have flooded timelines with hyper-realistic, AI-generated short videos, some featuring familiar cartoon characters or even recreations of deceased celebrities. This trend has reignited global debates around copyright and digital ethics.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) criticised OpenAI for enabling users to generate videos with copyrighted characters. “Videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service,” said Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA. 

“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue. Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

Videos featuring figures from SpongeBob SquarePants, Rick and Morty, and South Park have already appeared on Sora, alongside deepfakes of the late actor Robin Williams, prompting his daughter, Zelda Williams, to publicly urge users to stop sharing AI-generated clips of her father.

In response to the issue, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced a policy reversal. The company will shift from an opt-out model, which allowed the use of copyrighted material unless rights holders objected, to an opt-in system that gives creators “granular control” over how their intellectual property is used. 

Altman also confirmed that OpenAI plans to share revenue with creators whose licensed content is featured on Sora and may introduce monetisation options for original videos.

Speaking at OpenAI’s DevDay event, Altman acknowledged that Sora’s restrictions have frustrated some users but urged understanding as the company refines its policies. “Please give us some grace,” he said. “The rate of change will be high.”