In recent interviews, including his December 2025 appearance on the Big Technology Podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered a nuanced and provocative analysis of Google’s position in the AI race. According to Altman, Google simultaneously holds the greatest business model in tech history and the very weakness that could limit its ability to fully embrace artificial intelligence.
Google’s Search Empire: A Near-Perfect Machine
Altman openly praises Google’s search-advertising engine as an unparalleled achievement in profitability and scale. Its power rests on three core pillars.
First is massive distribution. Through Google Search, Chrome, and Android, Google controls the default behavior of the internet for billions of users worldwide. This dominance makes Google the starting point for nearly all online information discovery.
Second is high competitive friction. Users are deeply conditioned to “Google” everything. Breaking that habit is extraordinarily difficult, even for well-funded challengers with better technology.
Third is Google’s full-stack advantage. Unlike startups, Google owns its own AI chips (TPUs), cloud infrastructure, and vast data pipelines. This allows it to train and deploy advanced models such as Gemini far more efficiently than most competitors.
The Core Weakness: Incentives and Architecture
Despite these strengths, Altman argues that Google’s success creates structural vulnerabilities. The most significant is a revenue conflict. Google’s profits depend on ad clicks, yet AI’s greatest promise is delivering instant, accurate answers. As Altman bluntly put it, ads on Google Search work best when Google “does badly” when users must click multiple links rather than receive a direct response.
Altman also criticizes Google for “bolting AI onto” existing products instead of rebuilding them from the ground up. He believes AI-first experiences will replace traditional search interfaces, making chat sidebars and incremental updates insufficient.
Finally, there is institutional inertia. Google’s search business is so lucrative that fully cannibalizing it requires extraordinary internal courage. This hesitation, Altman argues, represents the classic vulnerability of incumbents.
Why OpenAI Is Still on “Code Red”
Despite identifying Google’s weaknesses, Altman does not underestimate the threat. He revealed that OpenAI has entered internal “Code Red” status multiple times, especially following the release of Gemini 3. He even admitted that Google could have decisively beaten OpenAI in 2023 had it moved faster.
Altman believes the endgame is agentic AI intelligent systems that perform tasks, coordinate with other agents, and make decisions on a user’s behalf. In such a future, traditional ad-supported search could become obsolete.
The Problem With Ad-Supported AI
Altman has described ad-driven AI as potentially “dystopian.” If AI recommendations are influenced by paid placements rather than truth, user trust collapses. This concern explains OpenAI’s preference for subscription-based models, which Altman argues better align company incentives with user outcomes.
In Altman’s view, the AI revolution won’t be decided by scale alone but by who is willing to abandon old incentives to build truly AI-native products.
