Three years ago, Samsung banned ChatGPT after its own engineers pasted confidential code into it. This week, the company is rolling it out broadly across key parts of its workforce.
On Monday, OpenAI announced that Samsung Electronics is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to employees worldwide across key parts of its business, calling it one of the largest deployments in the company's history. That covers a large swath of the company, from the engineers working in Samsung's chip fabs to marketers writing product copy.
The 2023 ban happened after Samsung engineers reportedly pasted sensitive source code into the public version of ChatGPT to help debug it. The problem was that anything users typed into consumer ChatGPT could be used to train future models, creating a risk that Samsung's proprietary code would be absorbed by an outside system. In response, the company blocked it across the organization and started building its own internal AI tools instead. None of those tools appeared to gain significant traction.
ChatGPT Enterprise is designed to close that gap. The key difference from the consumer version is that customer data isn't used to train OpenAI's models, comes with admin controls, SOC 2 compliance, and an audit log that lets companies see what their employees are doing. It's the version OpenAI built specifically so security-conscious enterprise customers like Samsung would actually let it in the door.
The more interesting part of the deal is what Samsung wants to do with Codex, OpenAI's coding agent. Codex weekly active users in Korea have grown nearly 800% since February, and OpenAI now has more than 5 million people using it globally. But Samsung is not just thinking about developers. The company recently announced a plan to transition its global manufacturing operations into "AI-driven factories" by 2030, and Codex is positioned as the layer that makes that possible.
"The next phase of manufacturing innovation lies in building autonomous environments where AI truly understands operational contexts in real time and independently executes optimal decisions," YoungSoo Lee, Executive Vice President at Samsung Electronics, said in the company's announcement. The pitch is that Codex doesn't just help engineers write software, it eventually runs the factory floor.
Roh Tae-moon, who runs Samsung's DX Division, framed the deal as "the fundamental starting point" for changing how the company works, not just a tool for employees to play with. Harrison Kim, the head of OpenAI Korea, called it a "historic deployment" because Samsung is treating AI as something for everyone in the company instead of giving it to a few specialized teams.
For OpenAI, the Samsung deal is the payoff for two moves we've covered in recent weeks. The company has been quietly building out an enterprise sales machine by poaching from Salesforce, and it acquired Ona earlier this year specifically to make Codex enterprise-ready with the kind of security controls and self-hosted sandboxes that companies like Samsung require. The Samsung rollout is what those investments were actually for.
The most interesting line in this whole deal is the one about autonomous factories. Selling ChatGPT to office workers is the boring part of the enterprise AI story, and most of the big rollouts so far have looked roughly the same: emails get written faster, slide decks come together quicker, nothing fundamental changes. Samsung is pointing at something different. If Codex eventually moves from helping engineers debug code to making decisions on a chip fab floor, that is the version of enterprise AI that actually rewrites how a company operates. Whether OpenAI can deliver on that is a much bigger question than whether Samsung's marketers like the new chatbot.
