SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2026, 04:27 PDT
The Information reported on April 5 that OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has warned internally that the ChatGPT maker may not be ready for an initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, putting her at odds with CEO Sam Altman, who wants to move faster. Friar has also raised concerns about the scale and risk of the spending required to support such a listing, the report said. 1
The timing matters now because OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round last week at an $852 billion valuation after the financing, and investors are again gearing up for mega tech listings. Reuters reported on April 1 that OpenAI and rival Anthropic are among AI companies considering listings later this year that could raise tens of billions of dollars. 2
A public listing would give OpenAI access to a deeper capital pool and stock it could use for acquisitions. But it would also force more Wall Street discipline onto a business still carrying huge infrastructure bills; Friar said in May 2025 that to be public, “you definitely need some sense of predictability.” 3
That is where the gap appears sharpest. The Information said Friar has warned that compliance, internal systems and other organizational work remain unfinished, and that OpenAI could burn more than $200 billion before turning cash-flow positive; Reuters reported in February that the company expected roughly $600 billion of compute spending through 2030 — compute means the chips and data-center power needed to train and run AI models. 4
The report also described strain at the top. Reports citing it said Friar now reports to applications chief Fidji Simo rather than directly to Altman and has at times been left out of financial discussions, including a meeting with a major investor on server procurement; Simo began a medical leave days ago as OpenAI reshuffled senior roles. 5
OpenAI is not short of growth. In its March 31 funding announcement, the company said it was generating $2 billion a month in revenue and had more than 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, while laying out plans for a unified “superapp” combining ChatGPT, Codex, browsing and other agent tools. 2
That has not eased competitive pressure. Reuters reported on April 1 that OpenAI has twice redrawn its product roadmap in six months as Google’s Gemini and Anthropic gained ground, pushing the company to focus harder on coding and enterprise software just as Anthropic also weighs an IPO. 6
“There’s a big race to lock in as much enterprise, as many desks as possible,” Matt Kropp of Boston Consulting Group’s AI unit told Reuters last month. The scramble for sticky corporate contracts helps explain why timing has become so sensitive ahead of any listing. 7
Still, a faster float is far from a straight line. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that OpenAI expected $121 billion of spending on computing power for AI research by 2028 and did not see profitability until the 2030s, while Melissa Otto of S&P Global Visible Alpha told Reuters last week that any pullback in AI capital expenditure could be “a catalyst” for a broader equity-market correction. 8
Friar said in May 2025 that OpenAI’s new structure could get the company to an “IPO-able event” “if and when we want to.” The latest reporting suggests that timing remains the live argument inside the company. 9
