OpenAI Has Declared ‘Code Red’ Multiple Times, Executive Says

Sam Altman’s decision to declare a “code red” at OpenAI earlier this month may have caught the industry’s attention, but it wasn’t a first for the artificial intelligence company.

The San Francisco-based startup’s leadership has made the same declaration previously, explicitly instructing employees to drop lower-priority tasks and concentrate on a single goal, said OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen. “We do this when we want to have this focusing effort on one particular topic,” Chen said in an interview.

The latest code red came two weeks after Alphabet Inc.’s Google released a widely praised new AI model that outperformed OpenAI’s best software on a number ...