OpenAI Internal Document Reveals Meta as Top Competitor Despite Llama 4 Struggles and Leadership Shakeup

The AI Titan's Battle: OpenAI Names Meta as Chief Rival in Leaked Strategy Document

In a remarkable disclosure from ongoing antitrust proceedings, OpenAI has identified Meta Platforms as its most significant competitive threat for 2025, according to confidential internal documents revealed during the U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC remedies hearing. The strategic planning document, marked "Confidential" and circulated among OpenAI's leadership team including CEO Sam Altman, outlines the company's ambitions to transform ChatGPT from a conversational AI into a comprehensive "super-assistant" that could fundamentally alter how users interact with the internet.

The leaked H1 2025 strategy document provides an unprecedented window into the intensifying battle between AI powerhouses and signals a dramatic shift in the competitive landscape, where traditional search giants like Google are no longer viewed as the primary challengers to OpenAI's dominance.

Meta's Distribution Empire Poses Existential Challenge to ChatGPT

OpenAI's leadership explicitly names Meta as "the biggest threat" due to what they describe as the social media giant's unparalleled ability to "embed equivalent functionality across their products" including WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook. The document specifically highlights Meta's capacity to leverage "their social graph for personalization" without facing "the business model cannibalization risks that Google does."

This assessment comes despite Meta's current challenges with its Llama 4 AI model development. Industry sources indicate Meta's engineers have "struggled to advance Llama 4 beyond incremental gains," with the company's flagship "Behemoth" release postponed from its original April 2025 timeline to fall or later amid performance issues. The setbacks have reportedly triggered internal turmoil, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that senior Meta executives are so disappointed with the Llama 4 team that management changes—including replacing VP Head of GenAI Ahmad Al-Dahle—are under active consideration.

Mark Zuckerberg has responded to these setbacks with an aggressive capital expenditure plan, committing between $60-65 billion in 2025 to bolster Meta's AI infrastructure and launch a standalone "Meta AI" assistant app.

"The battle between OpenAI and Meta represents a fundamental power struggle for who will control the next computing platform," said a technology investment strategist who requested anonymity due to sensitivity of ongoing market positions. "It's about whether social distribution or technical superiority will ultimately win the day."

OpenAI's Strategic Pivot from Chatbot to "Super-Assistant"

The document reveals OpenAI's vision to transform ChatGPT beyond its current capabilities into what it terms a "super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do."

This evolution hinges on new models like "o2" and "o3" that OpenAI claims are "finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks" – meaning the AI can independently complete complex sequences of actions on behalf of users. The strategy emphasizes ChatGPT becoming "an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills" combining "broad skills for daily tasks that are tedious, and deep expertise for tasks that most people find impossible."

The company's leadership team anticipates this positioning will allow ChatGPT to gradually become "the primary interface for users to interact with the digital world, and eventually, the physical world through connected devices" – a dramatic expansion beyond its origins as a text-based conversational AI.

The Search for Competitive "Moats" in AI's Battlefield

Central to OpenAI's strategy is the development of defensive "moats" – sustainable competitive advantages that rivals cannot easily replicate. The document identifies four such potential moats, with two targeted for immediate development in the first half of 2025:

"Unmatched Model Superiority & Innovation Velocity"
"Deep Personalization & User Trust (Contextual Understanding)"

For the latter half of 2025, OpenAI plans to develop two additional competitive barriers:

Making ChatGPT "truly agentic and capable of completing tasks autonomously"
Driving "action on the open web and within third-party applications through robust integrations"

These strategic defenses are being developed as OpenAI positions itself for what the document describes as becoming "the interface to the internet" – requiring the company to build or license "a comprehensive, real-time web index" and develop "a secure framework for executing actions (e.g., bookings, purchases, communication) via APIs or direct web interaction."

Policy Battles Loom as AI Assistants Seek Default Status

Perhaps most revealing is OpenAI's explicit acknowledgment that policy and regulatory intervention will be crucial to its competitive positioning against established tech giants. The document outlines an aggressive policy agenda targeting "powerful incumbents who will leverage their distribution to advantage their own products and potentially implement technical or business barriers to hinder competitors like us."

OpenAI's policy goals for H1 2025 include advocating for regulations that would prevent platform lock-in, ensuring users can choose their default AI assistant on major operating systems including iOS, Android, and Windows. The company also aims to push for "fair API access" to web indexes owned by Google and Microsoft.

"Our policy stance will be to advocate for open ecosystems, data portability, and fair competition in AI services," the document states. "Real choice drives competition and benefits everyone. Users should be able to pick their AI assistant."

This positioning comes as U.S. antitrust trials examine default-search and index-access rules that could fundamentally reshape how AI assistants compete for users' attention.

The Silicon Arms Race Behind AI Domination

Underlying the product and policy battles is an intensifying competition for computational resources and AI infrastructure. While Meta has publicly committed to spending $60-65 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, OpenAI is developing its own custom chip design under the U.S. government-backed "Stargate" program.

Industry analysts note that this infrastructure battle may ultimately determine which company can deliver on the promise of increasingly capable AI assistants at sustainable costs.

"The economics of running these models at scale remains the biggest unsolved challenge," said an industry consultant who specializes in AI infrastructure. "Meta has the advantage of an ad-funded model to offset compute costs, while OpenAI's subscription approach provides direct revenue but requires convincing users of premium value."

OpenAI's document acknowledges this tension, noting that "growth and revenue won't line up forever" and anticipating that "compute costs will continue to rise and competition will intensify on free offerings."

As the competition intensifies, both companies are borrowing from each other's playbooks. While Meta leverages its social platforms to distribute its AI assistant, OpenAI is reportedly developing a social-style feed for ChatGPT and considering an X-like standalone social app.

This convergence suggests the battle may ultimately come down to whether Meta can solve its model performance challenges before OpenAI can build sufficient distribution channels and user engagement.

For investors and industry observers, the key metrics to watch include Meta's progress on its delayed "Behemoth" model, adoption rates for OpenAI's social features, and regulatory decisions regarding default AI assistants and index access.

The document concludes with OpenAI's assessment of its competitive position: "We have what we need to win: one of the fastest-growing products of all time, a category-defining brand, a research lead (reasoning, multimodal), a compute lead, a world-class research team, and an increasing number of effective people with agency who are motivated to ship."

Whether this confidence will withstand Meta's massive infrastructure investments and unparalleled user reach remains the defining question of 2025's AI landscape.