Sam Altman says OpenAI built Codex despite trailing Claude Code
jxnlco · x · 2026-07-26
Sam Altman said building Codex was a “crazy kamikaze mission” because OpenAI was already behind Claude Code, but the team still took on the challenge.
He argued that the usual consensus is to move on when a competitor has momentum in a product category, yet OpenAI decided Codex was important enough to pursue anyway. Altman also claimed that Codex is now the product most of the best coders he knows use.
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