OpenAI IPO Delay To 2027? Sarah Friar Flags $600 Billion Risk As Sam Altman Pushes 2026 Listing

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is reportedly pushing to delay the company's initial public offering to 2027. But CEO Sam Altman wants to list the company in Q4 2026. This has led to an internal conflict among the two camps.

That tension, reported by Gizmodo, has led to the most consequential internal debate in Silicon Valley right now. OpenAI, which is also embroiled in a legal battle with Elon Musk, completed a conversion from a nonprofit-controlled structure to a for-profit public benefit corporation earlier this year so it can go public. But the financial and operational outlook underneath is more complicated.

Friar joined OpenAI as its first chief financial officer in 2024, after she stepped down as CEO of Nextdoor Holdings. She has since raised two major concerns: whether OpenAI can meet the rigorous reporting standards required of a public company and whether its revenue trajectory is strong enough to withstand the scrutiny that comes with a stock exchange listing.

According to Reuters, OpenAI failed to reach its internal target of 1 billion weekly active users on ChatGPT and missed several monthly revenue targets through 2026.

OpenAI's $600 Billion Infrastructure Bet

OpenAI has accumulated approximately $600 billion in future spending commitments for data centers and computing capacity, CNBC reported in February. It represents obligations tied to the company's aggressive infrastructure buildout as it competes for the processing power needed to train and run frontier AI models.

Friar has flagged to colleagues that if revenue growth does not accelerate, those capital commitments could strain the company's finances at precisely the moment it is seeking to present a clean balance sheet to prospective public investors. She and other senior executives have been working to tighten cost controls and strengthen internal financial oversight in response.

Publicly, though, Friar has pushed back on the most pessimistic readings of the company's performance.

'Going up a vertical wall of demand,' she said in a statement, asserting that OpenAI continues to outpace its own plan at the highest level. But that characterization stands in contrast to reports of missed internal benchmarks.

Despite raising $122 billion in capital, OpenAI's revenue miss triggered notable declines in the stock prices of several of the company's technology partners. The broader AI infrastructure sector keeps pulling in enormous capital flows.

The Competitive and Legal Pressures

OpenAI's IPO calculus is further complicated by a shifting competitive picture. Anthropic, the AI safety company founded by former OpenAI researchers, has reportedly reached $30 billion in annualized revenue compared to OpenAI's $25 billion. Separately, Anthropic is reportedly seeking a valuation of $900 billion, which would surpass OpenAI's current $852 billion valuation.

On the legal front, Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and early OpenAI backer who departed the company's board in 2018, is pursuing a lawsuit against OpenAI seeking $150 billion in damages. Musk is also asking the court to force the company to unwind its conversion to a for-profit structure, according to Time.

One constraint on OpenAI's revenue diversification has recently lifted. Microsoft's exclusive licensing agreement with OpenAI has ended, according to The Next Web, freeing the company to distribute its products through any cloud provider. That change expands OpenAI's addressable market for enterprise contracts and could improve the revenue picture Friar is trying to stabilize before any listing proceeds.

The structural question Friar appears to be pressing internally is not simply whether OpenAI can go public, but whether going public on Altman's timeline serves the company's long-term financial health. A 2027 listing would give the company an additional year to close the gap between its infrastructure commitments and its revenue base, satisfy public reporting requirements, and resolve or contain the Musk litigation.