OpenAI is more likely to delay its initial public offering until next year, three people involved in the company’s deliberations said, in a turn of events that underscores the uncertain future of the fast-rising artificial intelligence giants.
The creator of ChatGPT has hired bankers and lawyers with a focus on an IPO in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to these people. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, pushed these advisors to find a way for the startup to reach a valuation of $1 trillion, above the company’s last private valuation of $730 billion, according to people involved in the process, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions.
But a sequence of recent events has led OpenAI executives to back away from their more aggressive ambitions. At the top of the concerns is what happened to Elon Musk’s SpaceX after its IPO this month. It was the biggest in history, raising more than $85 billion and reaching a valuation of $1.77 trillion upon debut. Since then, however, SpaceX shares have been on a downward trajectory, closing Thursday’s trading session at US$153, after reaching US$202 last week.
Global markets have also been volatile in recent weeks, with technology stocks pushing indexes lower as investors question whether AI companies will be able to deliver on their wildly ambitious promises.
That prompted OpenAI advisers, in conversations with the company over the past week, to warn that it might not find much enthusiasm among retail investors for its shares, two of the people involved said.
OpenAI’s decision to hit the brakes on its IPO plans could disappoint Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Public offerings from OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, which has also said it is preparing to debut on Wall Street, could trigger a new wave of generational wealth. OpenAI said this month that it had confidentially filed documentation with market regulators to begin the IPO process, but did not publicly commit to any deadline.
Continues after advertising
A $1 trillion public market valuation, higher than Walmart’s market cap, would be impressive for OpenAI, a startup not yet believed to have turned a profit and that is spending aggressively on new data centers.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment beyond the company’s previous statement.
OpenAI advisors presented the company’s executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public at a $1 trillion valuation, or reducing the intended valuation to carry out an IPO more quickly. Altman, according to a person in contact with him on the matter, responded that any change to the $1 trillion valuation was out of the question.
Continues after advertising
OpenAI is also dealing with other issues. At the end of last year, Sarah Friar, the company’s financial director, stated that the company was not seeking an IPO at that time and was focused on strengthening its financial structure. Since then, the company has continued pouring resources into data centers and computing capacity, with no signs of slowing down.
The company has also been spending heavily on marketing and recruiting prominent engineers from companies like Meta and Google. In addition, it is looking at other sources of revenue, including testing ads within ChatGPT and e-commerce deals with companies like Shopify and Stripe, which would allow people to buy products from online stores directly within ChatGPT.
These initiatives are still in early and experimental stages, two OpenAI employees said. The company recorded about $13 billion in revenue in 2025, according to one of these people, a figure the company expects to triple this year. OpenAI said this year that it was generating $2 billion in revenue per month.
Continues after advertising
But some OpenAI executives appear to have changed their minds about an IPO just months after Friar said the company did not intend to go public. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to debut on the stock exchange by the end of 2026.
That surprised some employees because they believed the company didn’t yet have a strong enough financial foundation, two people familiar with the company’s plans said.
OpenAI faces acute pressures. Anthropic, which offers the Claude Code tool for creating sophisticated software, has had success selling its service to companies. At the same time, Gemini, Google’s flagship consumer AI product, gained popularity among users.
Continues after advertising
After years of strong growth in downloads of the ChatGPT consumer app, these numbers have slowed down and continue to hover around 900 million users, surprising investors who believed the company would easily reach 1 billion.
Over the past six months, OpenAI has undergone an almost complete overhaul. Under Fidji Simo, CEO of artificial general intelligence deployment, OpenAI began abandoning “side quests” — a term used to describe non-essential tasks in a role-playing game — including loss-making divisions like its video-generating app, Sora. And to follow Anthropic, OpenAI is building a commercial team to push Codex, its programming product, among larger enterprise customers.
Despite hesitation about an IPO, OpenAI executives believe the company is heading in the right direction, according to two employees. More than 5 million people use Codex weekly, the company said in a blog post this month.
The company also recently announced that it had more than 2 million enterprise customers. And last week, it recruited Noam Shazeer from Google in a hire widely seen as a major coup within the close-knit AI research community. Shazeer was one of the authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the “transformer architecture” in AI — the “T” in ChatGPT.
This article was originally published on The New York Times.
