The 2018 Warning That Echoes Through Today's AI Battle
On January 31, 2018, Elon Musk sent a stark message to OpenAI's leadership—Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. Without any pleasantries, he presented a chart showing DeepMind and Google Brain dominating artificial intelligence research while OpenAI lagged behind. "OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google," Musk wrote bluntly.
This warning, detailed in Sebastian Mallaby's book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence and excerpted in Colossus magazine, landed nearly eight years ago. Today, it reads like a prophecy coming to life.
A Dramatic Role Reversal in the AI Landscape
By December 2025, the tables had turned completely. It was Sam Altman who was now sending the alarming memo, declaring a company-wide "code red" to fix ChatGPT. The trigger? A surging Google Gemini and rapidly growing Anthropic were eating into OpenAI's enterprise lead, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The immediate catalyst was Google's release of Gemini 3 the previous month—a model that cleared industry benchmarks and pushed the app to 650 million monthly active users by October 2025. Altman told staff that OpenAI needed to urgently improve ChatGPT's personalization, speed, reliability, and the range of questions it could answer.
This marked a striking reversal from November 2022, when ChatGPT's launch had originally set off a code red at Google, with CEO Sundar Pichai warning his team that the chatbot could threaten Search itself. Now, the panic was flowing in the opposite direction.
Anthropic's Rapid Rise Adds Pressure
Anthropic compounded OpenAI's challenges significantly. By September 2025, the company had crossed 300,000 business customers—up from fewer than 1,000 just two years prior, according to CNBC reports. Its Claude Code and enterprise tools had become the default choice for software developers across Silicon Valley.
By March 2026, OpenAI's own applications chief Fidji Simo was telling staff in an all-hands meeting that Anthropic's success should serve as a "wake-up call," urging them not to get distracted by "side quests," as reported by the WSJ.
The Governance Battles That Shaped Today's AI Competition
None of these developments occurred in isolation. Mallaby's book traces the roots of this rivalry back to 2015, when DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman launched an ambitious—and ultimately doomed—attempt to build a safety governance structure for AI, internally code-named "Project Mario."
The plan involved a so-called 3-3-3 board: three DeepMind members, three from Alphabet, and three independents. Reid Hoffman committed $1 billion to back a potential walkout from Google. The talks dragged on for three years, with Pichai and Google's legal chief David Drummond running what DeepMind's founders came to see as an endless good cop/bad cop routine. Ultimately, nothing was ever signed.
Parallel Drama at OpenAI
Meanwhile, parallel drama was unfolding at OpenAI. Musk, convinced that Altman was maneuvering for control, grew increasingly erratic. He proposed folding OpenAI into Tesla. When the team refused, he quit—storming out of an all-hands meeting after calling an intern who questioned his judgment a "jackass."
His January 2018 memo was essentially his parting shot. Brockman pushed back the same day, arguing that conference papers were a poor measure of progress. "It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies," he wrote. But Musk had already made up his mind.
Musk's Prediction and Its Lasting Relevance
Musk's 2018 warning has proven to be less a parting shot and more an early read on a structural problem that OpenAI continues to wrestle with today. Google possessed the research talent, the computing power, and the revenue to sustain a prolonged AI war. OpenAI had momentum and a popular chatbot. For a while, that seemed sufficient.
But Gemini 3's arrival in late 2025 fundamentally changed the calculus. The model didn't just beat ChatGPT on benchmarks—it deployed across Google's entire ecosystem almost overnight, reaching billions of existing users within days. This distribution advantage was precisely what Musk had pointed to back in 2018 when he showed Altman the chart and declared that the numbers didn't lie.
The Financial Reality Check
Altman's code-red memo, reported by the WSJ, represented in many ways an admission that Musk had identified a critical vulnerability. OpenAI still leads in weekly active users—800 million as of late 2025—but user counts don't pay the bills when burning through cash at OpenAI's rate.
The company needs to grow revenue to approximately $200 billion to turn a profit by 2030, according to its own projections. Google, meanwhile, funds its AI ambitions from a search business that generates enormous profits consistently.
Musk had wanted to solve OpenAI's financial problem by folding it into Tesla. The team refused, and he departed. Seven years later, the fundamental problem he identified remains unresolved—only now it's larger, with significantly more at stake for the future of artificial intelligence.
