SAN FRANCISCO, April 6, 2026, 04:27 PDT
According to The Information on April 5, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has told colleagues she doesn’t think the company will be ready to go public as early as the fourth quarter of 2026—running counter to CEO Sam Altman’s push for a quicker IPO. The report also notes that Friar flagged the magnitude and risk tied to the spending OpenAI would need to pull off a listing.
Timing is front and center after OpenAI just wrapped up a $122 billion funding round, pushing its valuation up to $852 billion. Investors are circling again, prepping for another surge in high-profile tech IPOs. Reuters flagged on April 1 that both OpenAI and competitor Anthropic are weighing going public later this year—potentially tapping markets for tens of billions.
An IPO would hand OpenAI a bigger pool of capital and a liquid stock currency for deals. The move, though, would pile on Wall Street scrutiny—a challenge for a company still lugging hefty infrastructure costs. “You definitely need some sense of predictability” to go public, Friar remarked in May 2025. Reuters
The divide shows up most clearly here. According to The Information, Friar flagged unfinished work in compliance, internal systems, and other key areas—plus warned OpenAI might blow through more than $200 billion before reaching positive cash flow. Back in February, Reuters put compute spending estimates at around $600 billion for the company through 2030. That’s the cost of chips and power for AI model training and operations.
The report points to tension in the upper ranks. Sources citing it say Friar, who used to report to Altman, now answers to applications head Fidji Simo—and she’s sometimes excluded from financial talks. She even missed a meeting with a major investor over server buys. Simo, for her part, just started a medical leave after OpenAI made changes in senior leadership.
Growth isn’t an issue for OpenAI. The company’s March 31 funding update put revenue at $2 billion per month, with weekly ChatGPT users topping 900 million. OpenAI also sketched out its vision for a new “superapp” that would bring ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and a suite of agent tools into one platform. OpenAI
Competitive heat hasn’t let up. On April 1, Reuters said OpenAI has overhauled its product plans twice within six months, reacting as Google’s Gemini and Anthropic advanced. The company’s shifted attention—more coding, more enterprise tools—arrives as Anthropic eyes a possible IPO.
“There’s a big race to lock in as much enterprise, as many desks as possible,” Matt Kropp from Boston Consulting Group’s AI unit said to Reuters last month. Scrapping for sticky corporate contracts, that rush is putting extra pressure on timing before any listing. Reuters
Still, speeding up the float won’t be a smooth ride. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal said OpenAI projected $121 billion in AI research computing spend by 2028, with profitability likely out of reach until well into the 2030s. Melissa Otto at S&P Global Visible Alpha told Reuters last week that any slowdown in AI capex could become “a catalyst” for a bigger equity-market pullback. The Wall Street Journal
Back in May 2025, Friar described OpenAI’s revamped structure as something that could bring the company to an “IPO-able event” — “if and when we want to.” Whether or not to move forward now, though, is still being debated internally, according to the latest reports. Reuters
