TheChek News Flow

As OpenAI faces intensifying pressure from rival Anthropic’s improved coding tools, CEO Sam Altman is telling employees and investors that his company is seeing its share of momentum.

Altman told OpenAI employees on Friday that ChatGPT, the company’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, is “back to exceeding 10% monthly growth,” according to an internal Slack message viewed by CNBC. OpenAI is also preparing to launch “an updated Chat model” this week, Altman said.

More than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week, but Google and Anthropic have been gaining ground. OpenAI declared a “code red” in December to improve ChatGPT, and temporarily sidelined several projects to focus on that effort.

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 Claude 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 stand-alone app for users with Apple

computers. Altman said Codex’s growth is “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.”

On Monday, 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.

OpenAI expects ads to make up less than half of its revenue long term, the person said. The digital ad market has long been dominated by Google and Meta, with Amazon

becoming a bigger player in recent years.

Message to investors

Altman and CFO Sarah Friar have been selling investors on OpenAI’s growth story as the company looks to wrap up what could be a $100 billion fundraising round, sources told CNBC.

In private meetings, the executives are highlighting OpenAI’s strength with consumers, growing enterprise business and access to compute, according 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.

OpenAI expects fundraising talks to heat up over the next two weeks, one person said. OpenAI closed a $41 billion round in March than included a $30 billion contribution from SoftBank and $11 billion from other investors.

The current funding round could close in two parts, as CNBC previously reported. The first would include capital from Microsoft and Nvidia as well as Amazon

, which is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in the company. Other contributions from participants like SoftBank, which has discussed putting in another $30 billion, would follow.

The details of the round are fluid and could still change.

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The new partnership involves both companies jointly developing new drugs

Chinese drugmaker Innovent Biologics 1801 6.42%increase; green up pointing triangle struck a partnership with Eli Lilly LLY 3.66%increase; green up pointing triangle to develop new treatments that could generate up to $8.5 billion in milestone payments.

Innovent said Sunday that it and its subsidiaries signed a deal with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to develop new medicines targeting cancer and immune system diseases globally, marking the seventh collaboration between the two companies.

Innovent’s shares jumped as much as 8.6% early Monday in Hong Kong before paring gains. The stock was last 7.0% higher.

Under the terms of the agreement, Innovent will lead the development of the new drugs from conception through Phase 2 clinical trials in China, while Eli Lilly will have exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize the treatments outside Greater China.

In exchange, Innovent will receive $350 million upfront and is eligible for milestone payments of up to around $8.5 billion, as well as tiered royalties on sales of each product marketed by Eli Lilly, the Chinese drugmaker said in an exchange filing.

Unlike previous agreements between the two, the new partnership involves both companies jointly developing new drugs, rather than Eli Lilly acquiring rights to an existing Innovent treatment.

Innovent said the collaboration moves beyond licensing agreements to create an end-to-end innovation ecosystem.

“The deal is a positive surprise to the market; while the drug assets and details evolved in the deal are yet to be decided, it’s more like a framework deal demonstrating long-term partnership,” said Cui Cui, Jefferies’ head of Asia healthcare research.

The collaboration is the latest in a long line of licensing deals reached between leading Chinese pharmaceutical companies and global biopharma giants in recent years. Western drugmakers are increasingly seeking to access China’s expanding pipeline of cutting-edge therapies and tap its vast, cost-efficient research and development ecosystem.

“We think this deal is another testament to Innovent’s R&D platform,” said Nomura China healthcare analyst Jialin Zhang, adding that partnering with Eli Lilly improves the clinical and commercial prospects for Innovent’s new drugs outside the China market.

Eli Lilly’s continued collaboration with Chinese companies also suggests a decoupling between the U.S. and China on life sciences is unlikely to happen in the near term, Zhang said.

Amid market optimism around the sector’s rapid growth, the Hang Seng Biotech Index—a key tracker of Chinese companies in the sector—is up more than 9% so far this year, outperforming the broader Hang Seng Index.