OpenAI on Thursday confirmed a report by The Wall Street Journal that it is working to combine its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex, and browser into a single desktop “superapp,” aimed at streamlining the overall user experience.
The company said OpenAI President Greg Brockman will temporarily oversee the product revamp and related organisational changes. Meanwhile, Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will lead the sales team as OpenAI gears up to bring the new app to market, according to a company spokesperson.
In an internal note to employees, Fidji Simo acknowledged that the company had been stretching itself too thin across multiple apps and technology stacks, according to The Wall Street Journal. “We realised we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts,” she said.
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She added that this fragmentation had begun to impact performance and standards, noting, “That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.”
Company executives believe consolidating their tools into a single app will help streamline resources, as OpenAI looks to stay competitive with rivals like Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The move comes after OpenAI earlier this year rolled out a standalone desktop version of its Codex coding tool, part of a broader push to deepen its presence in the fast-growing AI code-generation space.
Several rival AI platforms are already moving in a similar direction, working toward more integrated, all-in-one experiences, even if they have yet to converge into a single desktop app. Anthropic’s Claude, for instance, has expanded beyond a basic chatbot by integrating third-party tools like Slack, Canva, and Figma within its interface, allowing users to handle multiple tasks in one place.
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At the same time, Microsoft’s Copilot is embedded across products such as Word, Excel, GitHub, and Teams, effectively functioning as a unified AI layer across productivity and coding workflows. Google is taking a similar approach with Gemini, weaving AI capabilities across its Workspace suite and developer tools to create a more seamless, end-to-end experience.
Beyond the big players, a growing number of newer tools are also experimenting with unified dashboards that bring multiple AI models into a single workspace, pointing to a broader industry shift toward consolidation and smoother user experiences.