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On 2026-07-26 Sam Altman told Fireside Alpha that building Codex was a "crazy…

2026-07-26 · 14:03 UTC ·@ajambrosino ·1 min read

Brief

Sam Altman told Fireside Alpha on July 26, 2026 that building Codex was a "crazy kamikaze mission" to beat Claude Code—OpenAI was "way behind" and industry consensus said it couldn't be done. He credited a tasked team with an "unbelievable" achievement and said most of the best coders he knows now use Codex.

Why it matters

On 2026-07-26 Sam Altman told Fireside Alpha that building Codex was a "crazy kamikaze mission" aimed at beating Anthropic's Claude Code because OpenAI was "way behind" in that coding-app category.

Key details

  • Altman said the consensus was that trying to overtake an incumbent was a "fool's errand," but he assigned a team the "important but extremely hard mission," which he called a "legitimate, unbelievable, very rare" business achievement.
  • Altman claimed that "most of the best coders I know now use Codex," indicating strong adoption among top engineers.
Source evidence

👀

Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha)

Sam Altman reveals building Codex was a "crazy kamikaze mission" to beat Claude Code and that most of the best coders he knows now use Codex.

"We were way behind Claude Code, and it seemed like a kind of crazy kamikaze mission to try to beat them with a coding app."

"The consensus is that this kind of thing never works, and you just move on to the next one. It's a fool's errand to try to win when someone else already has momentum in a particular product category."

"But we decided we thought it was really important. We asked a team to do it, and they performed a legitimate, unbelievable, very rare in the history of business thing."

"Now it is the product that most of the best coders I know use."

"That felt like an impossible thing, but if we hadn't asked the team, hey, we have a really important but extremely hard mission for you, it just wouldn't have happened."

Video

— https://nitter.net/firesidealpha/status/2081117624675791313#m