The AI Superbowl

Welcome to the tech brew ride home for Monday, 02/09/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Sam Altman assures staff that OpenAI had a good week, but is Anthropic definitively growing faster at this point? Is the CapEx spend about to eat all of Silicon Valley's free cash flow while Apple sits out the party? And the crypto.com guy runs the same playbook but now with ai.com. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. CNBC has seen internal Slack messages where Sam Altman is telling staff that ChatGPT is quote back to exceeding 10% monthly growth, and OpenAI plans to release an updated chat model this week. Quote, in his message on Friday, Altman said OpenAI's coding product codex grew about 50% from a week ago. Codex competes directly with Anthropic's clogged code, which has seen a wave of adoption over the last year. OpenAI launched a new codex model, GPT 5.3 codex last week, as well as a standalone app for users with Apple computers. Altman said codex's growth is, quote, insane according to the internal message. This was a great week, Altman wrote. It was also a contentious week, Altman and other senior executives took to social media to respond to swipes from Anthropic, which ran Super Bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI's decision to run ads within ChatGPT. In a post on x, Altman said that the commercials were deceptive and that OpenAI would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. Today, OpenAI will officially begin testing ads within ChatGPT according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Last month, the company said the ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot's answers, and will not influence ChatGpT's responses. In private meetings, company executives are highlighting OpenAI's strength with consumers, growing enterprise business, and access to compute according to one person who asked not to be named because the talks are private. OpenAI has been circulating charts as part of the discussions. One chart shows that codex, based on internal data, is eating into Claude Code's market share according to a screenshot seen by CNBC, end quote. The information says that this year's projected CapEx ramp up for all the big tech behemoths will all but wipe out free cash flow for the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta potentially forcing stock buyback cuts or more borrowing by them. Quote, most of the big tech companies in recent years have begun returning cash to shareholders through dividends and buying back stock. Google and Meta platforms, for instance, do both, but that could be difficult this year with capital expenditures aimed at expanding computing capacity for AI almost entirely absorbing the cash their operations generate. Google and Meta have already started to scale back their stock buybacks. Cutting off the dividend, though, could be tricky as both companies only introduced the payouts in 2024, which made their stocks more appealing …