OpenAI Wants to Kill the Chatbot It Created and Turn It into a Superapp

OpenAI has nearly 1 billion ChatGPT users. Most of them are free to use. That’s a problem the company is trying to solve before going public.

plan, report and Financial Times based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, it’s turning ChatGPT into a great app — a single interface for coding, automation, graphics, and companion apps. The remake is called “Aria.”

OpenAI has not confirmed the codename or the date of the active launch. Updates to the website and mobile apps are expected to begin rolling out in the coming weeks.

Thibault Sottiaux, who previously ran Codex and now leads all OpenAI products and platforms, told the FT that the goal is for an assistant “able to help you with everything in your life, whether it’s for yourself or at work.”

“Chat is dead,” a senior OpenAI official said Financial Times-not what you’d expect to hear from a company that built its empire on something called ChatGPT

WeChat did. Everyone tried.

The superapp idea has a brand: WeChat, Tencent’s app, which started as a messaging platform in 2011 and is now active. 45 billion messages per day for 1.4 billion monthly users. WeChat Pay is an alternative to Alipay $40 trillion in annual events. Chinese users book doctors, pay taxes, and ride snow without ever leaving the app. It stopped being a social network a long time ago and turned into software applications in their own right.

Elon Musk has been chasing that model since he bought Twitter in 2022. He publicly stated that he wants X to be the Western WeChat. In 2025, they launched XChat private messaging and X Money payments. Visa Agreement about peer-to-peer transfers. X has between 500 and 600 million users. Payment requests have not been completed. Meta experimented with Messenger bots in 2016 and WhatsApp payments for years. It also didn’t stick.

OpenAI’s approach is different. It’s not an attempt to create a social network – arguably a failed attempt that began and ended with Sora. Instead, it’s building on a platform that people already use – and making that platform more functional.

A Codex developer can write, debug, and deploy software from the source code. ChatGPT Support, was launched in July 2025it can browse the web, run apps, and place orders automatically. Work place assistant, it was released in April 2026manage multi-step workflows within Slack and other business tools.

That’s the stack OpenAI combines into a single interface.

IPO math

OpenAI’s annual revenue has exceeded $20 billion. Business customers get 40% of that revenue—and the majority of Codex users pay, unlike most ChatGPT users who don’t. Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital and a former OpenAI researcher, told the FT that a year ago OpenAI was “rocking the fences” when Anthropic “made money first.” Now, he said, “the two are converging, because both are trying to pursue an IPO and investors care more about money than dreams.”

Anthropic and direct forcing. Claude Code passed $2.5 billion in annual revenue by early 2026 — faster than any business software before — and businesses now account for nearly 80% of Anthropic’s total sales. Also, he looks set to beat OpenAI in the IPO game, secretly launching its own public offering. submission filed Form S-1 with the SEC last week. OpenAI is now playing, secret writing for its IPO today.

Alex Embiricos, OpenAI’s head of marketing, told the FT where he thinks this will end: “When we have AGI, I don’t think there will be many different models. Maybe there will be one group that I can talk to that can do everything I need.” OpenAI is also acquiring Python tool developer Astral to fold software tools directly into Codex. The IPO is targeting Q4 2026.