That's the problem isn't it. OpenAI have nothing to offer, neither does many of the other AI companies, nothing that's not replaceable at least.

They need to gobble up these other actors in an attempt to own something that someone might actually pay for. Anthropic seems successful with Claude Code and can drive sales that way.

OpenAI struggles to sell ChatGPT as a standalone offering, so they need products and services that will consume it, allowing them to push sales via that route. They also need to control those products, because LLMs are pretty much plug-able at this point, and that's no good. OpenAI needs a lock in.