Sam Altman says Codex was a “kamikaze mission” to catch Claude Code
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-07-26
Sam Altman says building Codex was a “crazy kamikaze mission” because OpenAI was behind Claude Code, but the team pushed through and turned it into what he now calls the coding tool most of the best coders he knows use.
He argues that once a product category has momentum, competitors usually assume it is pointless to catch up — yet OpenAI asked a team to take on that hard mission anyway, and it worked.
The quoted interview with OpenAI president Greg Brockman adds a broader thesis: compute is the real race, every provider will sell out its capacity, and the product beneath all of it is a personal AGI you can talk to.
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