OpenAI Merges ChatGPT, Codex, API Under Brockman Before Google I/O

OpenAI told employees on Friday that co-founder and president Greg Brockman will permanently lead all product strategy, merging ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API into a single organization. The structural overhaul, confirmed May 15 and reported widely by May 16, is timed three days before Google I/O 2026 opens on May 19 — and it is framed explicitly around the agentic super app OpenAI has been promising since March.

The reorganization affects how 900 million weekly ChatGPT users will interact with OpenAI's tools, and it determines whether the millions of developers building on the Codex and API platforms face a stable or disruptive transition. For now, OpenAI has not published an integration timeline.

Three Products, One Org Chart

Until Friday, ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API operated as largely independent lines, each with its own leadership, roadmap, and competitive positioning. ChatGPT pursued consumer reach. Codex served developers building AI-assisted coding workflows. The API monetized the broader ecosystem. Collapsing all three under one team is a structural admission that the previous arrangement had become unwieldy at the scale OpenAI now operates.

In a memo seen by WIRED, Brockman wrote that OpenAI was "consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus toward the agentic future, to win across both consumer and enterprise." In a separate line quoted by The Verge, he said the company would "invest in a single agentic platform and merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified agentic experience for all."

Brockman, who takes the role permanently after serving in it on an interim basis since early April, retains his existing responsibility for AI infrastructure. Thibault Sottiaux — the engineer who built Codex into one of OpenAI's fastest-growing products — now leads the combined core product and platform across consumer, enterprise, and developer surfaces. Nick Turley, who oversaw ChatGPT's expansion to its current user base since 2022, moves into a role focused on enterprise products and critical industries while continuing some involvement with ChatGPT.

The Super App Is the Strategy

The reorganization formalizes a project that became public in March, when the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was building a desktop "super app" combining ChatGPT, Codex, and its Atlas web browser into a single application. OpenAI confirmed the effort. Sottiaux later told reporters the company was "building the super app out in the open."

The mobile ChatGPT application will remain separate for now. The desktop app's defining feature is agentic behavior: a single product that carries a built-in browser, a code-execution layer, and a conversational interface — designed to complete multi-step digital tasks like scheduling, research, code deployment, and document drafting without the user switching between tools.

The rollout will be gradual. Codex will expand first to cover productivity tasks beyond coding, then ChatGPT and Atlas will be folded in. No launch date has been announced, meaning the product the reorganization is built to deliver will not ship during Google I/O week.

Google Pushes Into the Same Territory Tuesday

Google I/O 2026 opens May 19 with a keynote that confirms agentic coding and Gemini model updates as headliners. Two years ago, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o the day before Google I/O 2024 in a scheduling move that redirected industry attention. This year, OpenAI is not countering with a product launch. It is countering with an org chart.

The competitive pressure is real. Google's Gemini has grown its share of AI web traffic from 5.7% to 21.5% over the past twelve months, while ChatGPT's share declined from 86.7% to 64.5%, according to Similarweb data cited by CMC Markets. Concentrating resources onto one battlefield is a direct response.

A Thinner Bench Raises the Stakes

The reorg arrives after a brutal month of leadership turnover. On April 17, OpenAI lost three senior executives in a single day: Kevin Weil, former chief product officer; Bill Peebles, who built the now-shuttered Sora video generator; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of enterprise applications. Their departures followed Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, taking medical leave in early April — the vacancy that put Brockman in the interim product role now made permanent.

Researchers who built ChatGPT and GPT-4 have also moved to Anthropic, Meta's Superintelligence Labs, and independent startups. Consolidating the three product lines concentrates the most important remaining products and senior people onto one structure rather than spreading them further.

Developer Uncertainty Is Real

For the millions of developers building on Codex and the API, the reorganization creates real uncertainty. OpenAI has not announced an integration timeline or specified what it means for existing Codex API customers. Previous OpenAI platform changes — the deprecation of the Assistants API, the retirement of the GPT-4o endpoint, the shutdown of Sora — have shown the company will collapse products when priorities shift. Codex has 3 million weekly users and is adding roughly a million a month, growth Brockman cited internally as the reason to "double down."

The IPO Subtext

The clearest explanation for the timing is also the most widely reported. OpenAI is targeting a public listing as early as Q4 2026 and has held informal talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about advising the offering, with an $852 billion post-money valuation set in its most recent funding round. A prospectus describing three separate product teams competing for compute invites analysts to discount the multiple. A prospectus describing a single agentic platform with 900 million weekly users and a unified roadmap led by a founding engineer does the opposite.

Bottom Line

OpenAI's reorganization removes silos on paper. It does not deliver the agentic super app the strategy depends on, resolve developer uncertainty, or counter what Google will show on stage Tuesday. Watch the I/O keynote, then watch how quickly OpenAI ships the first concrete piece of the merged product.