By Deepa Seetharaman
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 5 – Your next coworker might be generated by AI.
OpenAI on Thursday said it is launching a service, called Frontier, for companies to build and manage so-called artificial-intelligence agents, or AI tools that can complete specific tasks, like fixing a software bug.
The platform is part of a broader effort by OpenAI to seize the enterprise market from its rivals – notably the AI startup Anthropic, which draws the bulk of its revenue from companies. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said enterprise growth would be a “huge focus” for his company.
The enterprise market is just one of many places where OpenAI and Anthropic are going head-to-head. Both companies are preparing to go public, a process that will pit them against each other for investor attention.
The two companies will also be running rival ads during the Super Bowl. Anthropic’s ad appears to be a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT, a critique that ruffled feathers at OpenAI on Wednesday. In a post on X, Altman described Anthropic’s ad as funny but “clearly dishonest.”
OpenAI executives said Frontier is meant to work with a company’s preexisting infrastructure as well as AI agents built by third parties.
That approach means that companies might adopt OpenAI’s enterprise tools faster than is otherwise possible, said Fidji Simo, who oversees OpenAI’s product and business teams as the startup’s CEO of applications.
“This is us saying we’re going to build an intelligence layer that’s going to help every enterprise turn on agents in a much easier way,” she said.
(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
