- OpenAI’s GPT-5 has more than doubled coding and agent-building activity since its debut and driven an eightfold jump in reasoning workloads.
- Platforms including Cursor, Vercel, JetBrains, Factory, Qodo and GitHub Copilot are rolling GPT-5 into certain default artificial intelligence workflows or public previews.
- OpenAI aims to convert early developer momentum into sustained enterprise AI adoption.
Sam Altman turned OpenAI into a cultural phenomenon with ChatGPT.
Now, three years later, he’s chasing where the real money is: Enterprise.
Last week’s rollout of GPT-5, OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence model, was rocky. Critics bashed its less-intuitive feel, ultimately leading the company to restore its legacy GPT-4 to paying chatbot customers.
But GPT-5 isn’t about the consumer. It’s OpenAI’s effort to crack the enterprise market, where rival Anthropic has enjoyed a head start.
One week in, and startups like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory say they’ve already made GPT-5 the default model in certain key products and tools, touting its faster setup, better results on complex tasks, and a lower price.
Some companies said GPT-5 now matches or beats Claude on code and interface design, a space Anthropic once dominated.
Box, another enterprise customer, has been testing GPT-5 on long, logic-heavy documents. CEO Aaron Levie told CNBC the model is a “breakthrough,” saying it performs with a level of reasoning that prior systems couldn’t match.
Behind the scenes, OpenAI has built out its own enterprise sales team — more than 500 people under COO Brad Lightcap — operating independently of Microsoft, which has been the startup’s lead investor and key cloud partner. Customers can access GPT models through Microsoft Azure or go directly to OpenAI, which controls the API and product experience.
Still, the economics are brutal. The models are expensive to run, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending big to lock in customers, with OpenAI on track to burn $8 billion this year.
That’s part of why both Anthropic and OpenAI are courting new capital.
OpenAI is exploring a secondary stock sale that could value the company around $500 billion and said ChatGPT is nearing 700 million weekly users.
Anthropic is seeking fresh funding at a potential $170 billion valuation.
Winning over enterprise
GPT-5 is significantly cheaper than Anthropic’s top-end Claude Opus 4.1 — by a factor of seven and a half, in some cases — but OpenAI is spending huge amounts on infrastructure to sustain that edge.
For OpenAI, it’s a push to win customers now, get them locked in and build a real business on the back of that loyalty.
Cursor, still a major Anthropic customer, is now steering new users to OpenAI. The company’s co-founder and CEO Michael Truell underscored the change during OpenAI’s launch livestream, describing GPT-5 as “the smartest coding model we’ve ever tried.”
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/08/14/gpt-5-openai-ai-enterprise.html
