A Look at OpenAI’s ‘Side Quests’ — and Why Some Didn’t Last

OpenAI has launched a dizzying number of side projects and collaborations over the past few years — and now it appears the AI lab may have bitten off more than it can chew.

After the breakout success of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI quickly became synonymous with generative AI, and it sent other companies scrambling to develop models and chatbots of their own. With an early lead in the AI arms race, OpenAI has aggressively sought to solidify its market dominance, branching into everything from AI-powered hardware to a video generation app. The company has expanded into consumer markets related to health, shopping, job search and much more, signaling a broader vision of AI embedded across every facet of life.

But as OpenAI spread its efforts across new teams and tackled new verticals, its competitors broke ahead with more sophisticated models and business applications. The launch of Google’s Gemini 3 inspired CEO Sam Altman to issue a “code red” alert to his staff, and now OpenAI finds itself trailing Anthropic, which has dazzled the business world with Claude Code, an agentic AI coding tool, and Cowork, an agentic tool for other knowledge workers. 

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, reportedly told her staff that Anthropic’s growing popularity should be a “wake-up call,” according to The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI has become “distracted by side quests,” she warned, adding that “fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.” As a result, OpenAI has discontinued several of these side quests — most notably, Sora — to shift its focus to the main story arc of enterprise business needs, especially software development. 

OpenAI has made recent strides in the professional space after releasing a desktop app for its agentic coding tool Codex in February 2026. A month later, it released its latest AI model, GPT-5.4, which it says is designed for professional work. Now, the company plans to combine ChatGPT, Codex and its Atlas web browser into a desktop “superapp” with agentic capabilities. By focusing its efforts on the superapp, OpenAI hopes teams will break out of their silos and become more streamlined, collaborative and efficient.

As OpenAI decides which of its side quests to deprioritize, let’s take a deeper look at which projects the company has announced so far — and which ones it’s already shuttered.

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Active OpenAI Side Projects

Atlas

In October 2025, OpenAI launched Atlas, an AI browser that allows users to ask ChatGPT a question about a website through a sidebar in the browser window. Atlas can also remember what users looked at, which allows ChatGPT to generate answers that are informed by the context of the users’ web history. Plus, Atlas has agentic AI features that can automate tasks and streamline the users’ workflow. OpenAI announced in March 2026 that it plans to integrate Atlas into a desktop “superapp” along with Codex and ChatGPT.

AI-First Devices

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in May 2025 that his company was developing a “family” of AI-first devices in partnership with former Apple executive Jony Ive, who led the design of the iPhone, iPod and other iconic Apple products. OpenAI also acquired I’ve’s company, io Products, Inc. While no products have been announced yet, The Information reported OpenAI has a team of 200 engineers working on a smart speaker, smart glasses and smart lamp. 

Agentic Shopping

In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, an agentic shopping feature that would allow users to purchase items from Walmart, Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants without ever having to leave the ChatGPT app. But handling retailers’ transactions was more difficult than expected, and six months later, the company announced that it had discontinued the checkout feature to focus on improving product discovery.

Now, users can upload images or describe a product, and ChatGPT will retrieve pictures, descriptions and up-to-date pricing for products that can be compared side-by-side against similar options. Retailers can also choose to create their own ChatGPT app to process transactions using their own platform.

ChatGPT Health

OpenAI announced in January 2026 that it would be launching ChatGPT Health, which allows users to connect their medical records and data from wellness apps like Apple Health, Function and MyFitnessPal into one platform that can better answer their questions about their health. The feature is powered through OpenAI’s partnership with b.well, which is used to access medical records, and its acquisition of Torch Health, which provides the “medical memory” to contextualize the data.

Robotics Program

In its early years, OpenAI researchers built a robotic hand that solved a Rubik’s Cube, but it eventually closed its robotics division shortly thereafter. The company rebooted its robotics program in January 2025, when Caitlin Kalinowski, its former hardware lead, announced it would be hiring its first robotics hardware roles. Around that same time, the company filed a trademark application that mentions “user-programmable humanoid robots” with “communication and learning functions for assisting and entertaining people.” About one year into the launch of the program, Business Insider reported that OpenAI has a team of 100 data collectors teaching a robotic arm how to perform household tasks, such as folding laundry and putting bread in a toaster.

Jobs Platform

OpenAI announced in September 2025 that it is building its own jobs platform that will use AI-powered job matching to connect employers with AI-fluent workers. The company told TechCrunch that the jobs platform will launch by mid-2026. It will also teach workers how to use artificial intelligence tools through the OpenAI Academy, which will offer certification programs that verify workers’ AI literacy.

TBPN

In April 2026, OpenAI announced that it had acquired Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN), a tech talk show that has been likened to the SportsCenter for Silicon Valley. 

The show streams live three hours a day, five days a week on X and YouTube. Unlike other tech media, which can be skeptical of AI, co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays have founded multiple tech startups and are bullish on AI’s future. They have interviewed some of Silicon Valley’s buzziest startup founders alongside CEOs from Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, and of course, OpenAI. 

TBPN’s staff will now report to Chris Lehane, OpenAIU’s global affairs officer, but TBPN claims that its agreement affords it the editorial independence to choose their own guests and cover what they want. OpenAI’s Simo said she was impressed not only by the show but its “comms and marketing instincts,” and that she plans to “leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives.”

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Shuttered OpenAI Side Projects

Sora

OpenAI launched Sora, an AI-powered video generation app, in September 2025. With Sora, users could create realistic videos with just a text prompt, and they could give themselves a cameo in the scene by uploading a picture of their face. The app peaked at about a million users after it launched, but it eventually dropped to less than half of that, according to The Wall Street Journal. Video generation also ate up valuable computing power that the company needed to power its latest AI model. One source told The Journal that Sora was losing the company $1 million per day. OpenAI shuttered the app in March 2026, about six months after its initial launch.

Adult Mode

Shortly after announcing age prediction and parental control features to safeguard teenagers’ ChatGPT experience, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would begin to “treat adult users like adults” by allowing erotica for verified adults. The “adult mode” idea, which would allow chatbots to engage in sexually explicit conversations, sparked considerable backlash, even from its own advisers. After Simo’s “side quest” warning in March 2026, Open AI announced it had “indefinitely” paused its plans for adult mode.

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