OpenAI to fold Codex, agents, and partner apps into ChatGPT 'superapp' ahead of IPO

The Financial Times, citing more than a dozen current and former employees, says the redesign rolls out in the coming weeks, with Canva and Booking.com among launch partners and Codex's weekly active users already up sixfold to 5 million.

OpenAI will collapse Codex, its agent products, image generation, and a roster of third-party apps into a single ChatGPT interface in the coming weeks, the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing more than a dozen current and former employees who describe the redesign as the largest overhaul since ChatGPT launched in 2022. Internally, the project is codenamed “Aria,” per TechCrunch, with Canva and Booking.com as launch partners and Expedia, Figma, Spotify, Coursera, and Zillow lined up in the pilot.

The framing matters as much as the feature list. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s core product and platform teams, told the FT the goal is a product “capable of helping you across everything in your life, be it personally or at work.” One senior employee put it more bluntly: “Chat is dead.”

That epitaph is really an IPO pitch. OpenAI has filed confidentially with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising, targeting a valuation as high as $1 trillion by late 2026. Sam Altman has said the company will list “when it makes sense.” A superapp narrative reframes ChatGPT’s 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers as the funnel for an enterprise business that already accounts for roughly 40% of revenue across two million paying businesses, a share the company expects to reach 50% by year-end.

It’s also a defensive move. Codex’s weekly active users have grown sixfold since launch to more than five million, but Anthropic disclosed in a May paper that Claude wrote more than 80% of the code merged into its own production codebase, and that Claude Code now accounts for 4.5% of all public commits on GitHub. Those numbers are doing real work inside enterprise procurement decks.

Reuters noted it couldn’t independently verify the FT report and that OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The superapp pivot echoes the WeChat-era ambitions Western platforms have circled for a decade without ever quite reaching; the difference now is that the bundling layer is a language model, and the listing prospectus is already with the bankers.

OpenAI to fold Codex, agents, and partner apps into ChatGPT 'superapp' ahead of IPO

Sources