OpenAI's leadership is at odds over an IPO in 2026 - The Information

The management of OpenAI, which created the chatbot ChatGPT, has disagreed over the timing of the IPO and the amount of capital expenditures, The Information has learned. The publication claims that the startup's CFO Sarah Fryar expressed concern about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's plans to take the company public in the fall of 2026, as well as the company's $600 billion in financial commitments and the risks of a ring-fenced financing scheme.

Fryar doubts OpenAI is ready for such an ambitious timeline: she has warned colleagues that an IPO this year may be premature, pointing to the scale of preparation required, including building out corporate procedures and compliance, Seeking Alpha reported, citing The Information.

The CFO is also concerned about the company's unprecedented capital expenditures. OpenAI has committed to spending more than $600 billion over the next five years to expand its cloud capacity and purchase AI servers. Given the slowdown in revenue growth, Fryar doubts the feasibility of such investments, The Economic Times writes with reference to The Information.

A separate risk, according to Fryar, lies in the looped financing structure: a significant portion of the $122 billion raised in the latest investment round will come from Amazon and Nvidia, which are simultaneously selling cloud infrastructure and chips to OpenAI. Internally, the company also discussed the risks associated with its dependence on Microsoft, whose changing relationship with the company could have a negative impact on the business.

The disagreement has led to growing tensions within OpenAI's leadership. According to The Information's sources, Fryar was excluded from a number of key financial discussions, including a recent meeting with a major investor over the purchase of servers. Her absence was conspicuous because she had previously been involved in talks on the topic, the sources said.

OpenAI CEO Altman expects to bring the company to the stock exchange ahead of its competitor, the startup Anthropic, which created the chatbot Claude. The listing of the latter for more than $60 billion could take place as early as October, Bloomberg wrote. Meanwhile, OpenAI continues to face pressure to meet revenue and user base growth targets. To increase revenues, the company in February began showing ads to users without paid subscriptions.

OpenAI shares are losing popularity on the secondary market: investors have begun to switch en masse to competitor Anthropic, Bloomberg has found out. Ken Smith, head of Next Round Capital, told the agency that he was unable to find buyers for OpenAI securities among hundreds of institutional clients - instead they are ready to allocate $2 billion to acquire stakes in Anthropic. According to Augment co-founder Adam Crowley, the more than twofold difference in valuations between OpenAI ($852 billion) and Anthropic ($380 billion) encourages investors to buy shares of the latter in anticipation of their future growth.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor