OpenAI spent the last year trying to be everything — a video platform, a shopping portal, even a purveyor of AI erotica.
Now it's racing to become a thing that makes money.
Why it matters: OpenAI is retreating from risky consumer features like adult content while prioritizing business tools and revenue growth — just as competition from Anthropic intensifies.
Business customers present the clearest revenue models. Those users want to generate text and build an army of agents to 10x the productivity of everyone left on their staff, not engage in erotic chatbot play.
Catch up quick: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the proposed erotica feature last October amid reports of declining time spent on ChatGPT.
But it ran into technical problems in testing, including trouble removing references to bestiality and incest, according to The Financial Times.
State of play: This is the third consumer retreat in days. OpenAI also:
Killed Sora, the AI video app that went viral after its September launch.
Scaled back Instant Checkout — its in-chat shopping feature — and is moving away from handling purchases.
Another blow, though not necessarily OpenAI's choice: Bloomberg reported Thursday that Apple now plans to let rival chatbots — including Claude and Gemini — integrate with Siri on iPhones.
OpenAI says the company is doubling down on what's working, avoiding distractions and seizing the moment.
Yes, but: OpenAI isn't giving up on the consumer and the consumer hasn't given up on ChatGPT, despite the hype around Claude.
ChatGPT still has 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers.
Between the lines: All signs point to OpenAI clearing the decks for an IPO and trying to turn those millions of active users into paying customers.
"ChatGPT is where people start with AI," OpenAI said in a blog post last month, announcing $110 billion in new investment to "bring frontier AI to more people, more businesses, and more communities worldwide."
On Tuesday — the same day it killed Sora — OpenAI published its updated Model Spec, the 100-page document that governs how ChatGPT behaves, a similar document to the one that Anthropic has been regularly updating for Claude.
The company framed its mission around "democratized access" to AI in health, science, education and work, a vision statement conspicuously scrubbed of anything resembling consumer entertainment.
What they're saying: Nixing spicy ChatGPT seems to please everyone (except those hoping to use it).
"Public pressure regarding AI's impact on child safety and mental health [has] been increasing continuously since OpenAI initially announced their plans to allow adult content," Jessica Ji, senior research analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Axios.
"I would look at it first as simply a pure business decision, much like their decision to shut down the Sora video generation project," Gus Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director of the Center for Technology Innovation & Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told Axios.
"This is not the time when a company wants to spook potential investors with legal, regulatory, or political uncertainty," Hurwitz said.
A cultural shift toward downsizing fueled by a GLP-1 drug boom and slimming celebrities is destabilizing for people trying to achieve acceptance, mental health experts and body positivity advocates tell Axios.
Why it matters: Still, the body positivity movement, advocates say, is an ongoing fight that won't shrink with the trends.
"Our brains must see evidence of body diversity," saysZoë Bisbing, a psychotherapist and the founder of Body-Positive Therapy NYC. If we don't, "our brains clock our bodies as wrong."
Flashback: Following the heroin-chic aesthetic of the '90s and early aughts, the 2010s brought curvy anthem "All About That Bass" and an attempt from some brands to elevate more realistic body standards.
But now, the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward media highlighting ultra-thinness, aided by access to GLP-1s and spotlighting celebrities who have slimmed down quickly.
What they're saying: "It absolutely feels like backtracking," says Katelyn Baker, a doctor of clinical psychology who shares body positivity content on TikTok as @thatfatdoctor.
"It hurts my heart because of all the work that I personally poured in, as well as all my friends and my colleagues and people who came before me," she said. "They're kind of disappearing."
Cassandra Cavallaro, a content creator who promotes movement for wellness rather than weight loss, says the rise of the now-banned "SkinnyTok" hashtag sent a "really concerning" message that "bodies are now becoming a trend again."
She emphasizes, "Real people's bodies aren't a trend."
Even stars are noticing the return of harmful appearance norms among fellow celebrities: Actress Jameela Jamil said in a recent video, "this is not just a health kick that Hollywood has undergone."
She continued, "We fought the system [with body positivity], and now we need to come back and do that again."
Between the lines: For those without the resources, Yeshiva University social work professor Dr. Nafees Alam says, the proliferation of drugs widens a two-tiered societal split between those who can afford medical intervention and those who have to "settle" for body positivity.
Systemic barriers to weight management are nothing new, he notes: "Health has been a privilege for those who are socioeconomically affluent for a very long time."
Worth noting: GLP-1s can bring relief to those who need them and offer widespread health benefits beyond Type 2 diabetes management, such as reduced risk of neurological issues and sleep apnea.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, a body positivity proponent and contributing writer at The Cut, told NPR that "our obsession with celebrities taking them has created an environment where we are not actually evaluating these drugs for their real value."
The drugs also carry side effects, including nausea, headaches and fatigue. In rare cases, there is an increased risk of GI disorders such as pancreatitis.
Health experts have argued the language we use to describe these drugs should frame them as a tool to treat a chronic disease rather than a vanity product. It's part of a broader growing awareness that the language clinicians use language to describe their patients can impact health.
Cavallaro says she doesn't see GLP-1 drugs as "inherently bad."
But the visibility of the weight-loss craze, she says, "brings up all this comparison and second-guessing of our bodies, especially for people who were starting to maybe feel OK ... Now they're questioning, should I be doing more? Should I be smaller?"
The bottom line: The body positivity movement, rooted in the 1960's push for fat rights, is more than just a hashtag or a trend — it's a battle for social justice that blazes on, Bisbing explains.
• "It's not you must love your body as you are," says Bisbing. "It's saying, 'Whoever you are, you have a right to love your body.'"
A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway is witnessing active reconnaissance activity, according to Defused Cyber and watchTowr.
The vulnerability, CVE-2026-3055 (CVSS score: 9.3), refers to a case of insufficient input validation leading to memory overread, which an attacker could exploit to leak potentially sensitive information.
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People who care for an adult child, partner or sibling have to face the reality that their loved may outlive them. Planning ahead is key but it's not easy.
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True market clarity will emerge only when we shift our focus from fleeting financial reactions to the physical engineering realities that power the globe.
