On December 2, 2025, Sam Altman issued an internal memo declaring OpenAI’s company-wide “Code Red” – a striking echo of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s identical terminology from exactly three years prior. The symmetry is remarkable: the disruptor has become the disrupted.
December 2022:Google faced existential threat from ChatGPT’s viral adoption – 1 million users in five days. OpenAI embodied the disruptivestartup archetype. Google’s response was dramatic: founders returned from retirement, engineers worked through holidays, and twenty AI products launched rapidly.
December 2025: The positions have inverted. Google’s Gemini 3 now leads benchmarks, with ecosystem growth from 450 to 650 million monthly active users in three months. OpenAI is pausing advertising, delaying AI agents, and consolidating resources around improving ChatGPT.
Three years turned the disruptor into the incumbent under siege.
Code Red Is Not a Metaphor
Code Red is a strategy – a specific organizational mode for responding to paradigm-shifting threats. It involves:
Resource Reallocation: Everything non-essential stops. All engineering capacity flows to the existential threat. Normal roadmaps become irrelevant.
Leadership Engagement: The most senior people in the organization engage directly with the problem. At Google in 2022, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came out of retirement.
Compressed Timelines: Decisions that normally take months happen in days. Reviews that require committees happen in hallways. The bureaucracy pauses.
Focused Output:Google launched 20 AI products in months after Code Red. The organization that seemed slow suddenly moved faster than startups.
What Distinguishes Survivors
The article demonstrates how incumbent advantage and organizational agility interact during technological disruption. The companies that survive Code Red moments share characteristics:
They recognize the threat early enough to respond. They have resources to redirect. They can actually execute differently when survival demands it. And critically – they don’t declare Code Red too often, preserving the organizational capacity for genuine emergencies.
Key Takeaway
Code Red moments reveal organizational truth: when survival is at stake, what does the company actually prioritize? The answer often differs from stated strategy. As startup defensibility analysis shows, the ability to respond to disruption – not just avoid it – separates lasting companies from cautionary tales.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
