OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser circulated a four-page memo to employees on Sunday that lays bare the company's competitive strategy against Anthropic and its vision for dominating enterprise AI. The memo, viewed by The Verge and partially reported by CNBC, represents a shift in how OpenAI is framing its market position as the AI competition intensifies.
Dresser, who recently took on much of former COO Brad Lightcap's duties as he transitions to special projects, frames the core challenge in stark terms: customer lock-in. She repeatedly emphasizes the importance of building what executives call a "moat" around OpenAI's products. The problem, as she describes it, is that users can easily switch between models based on whichever is topping the charts on any given week.
The solution, according to the memo, is a platform strategy rather than a collection of standalone products. "Multi-product adoption makes us harder to replace," Dresser wrote. She called for OpenAI to stop thinking like "a company with separate product lines" and instead adopt the mindset of "a platform company with multiple entry points and one integrated enterprise offering."
This platform approach is already showing results. Dresser notes that multi-year, multi-product, nine-figure enterprise deals are rising, and existing customers are expanding their usage across more of their organizations. The shift reflects a maturation of the enterprise AI market: raw capability, she argues, is no longer enough. Customers now demand fit—how well AI integrates into workflows, knowledge systems, controls, and day-to-day operations—along with trust, deployability, and the ability to improve over time.
On competition, Dresser is notably direct about Anthropic, OpenAI's longtime rival. She writes that "the market is as competitive as I have ever seen it" and takes aim at Anthropic's strategy. While she acknowledges that Anthropic's "coding focus gave them an early wedge," she argues that "you do not want to be a single-product company in a platform war." The memo also accuses Anthropic of inflating its stated run rate and calls it a "strategic misstep" for the company to not acquire sufficient compute capacity.
Dresser's characterization of Anthropic's brand positioning is particularly sharp: "Their story is built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI." This mirrors a broader OpenAI narrative that positions itself as democratizing AI against competitors focused on restriction. In February, CEO Sam Altman amplified this framing, writing that "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people."
The memo reveals OpenAI's calculation that the winner in enterprise AI will be the company that can offer a comprehensive, integrated system rather than best-in-class individual tools. With both OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly planning IPOs this year, this competitive positioning will likely become increasingly visible to investors and the market.