ChatGPT's weekly activity and revenue have not reached 1 billion, losing its leading position; OpenAI's CFO recommends delaying the IPO until 2027

According to Beating Monitoring, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar privately suggested postponing the IPO until 2027, arguing that the company has not yet met the financial reporting standards required of a publicly traded company. CEO Altman, meanwhile, hopes to go public as soon as possible in Q4 2026. The two previously issued a joint statement saying they are “completely aligned” on compute procurement issues, but multiple insiders have still confirmed the existence of this disagreement.

Behind the disagreement is slowing growth. At the end of last year, OpenAI set a goal of 1 billion ChatGPT weekly active users, but it failed to reach that target and has not announced any breakthrough in clearing this milestone to date. In December 2025, weekly active users were 800 million; by February 2026, they rose to 900 million, with growth clearly decelerating on a high base. Google Gemini is taking share on the consumer side, and Anthropic’s Claude Code is gaining momentum in the developer market. Early this year, OpenAI has missed multiple monthly revenue targets in succession. Annual revenue is about $25 billion, while Anthropic already surpassed $30 billion in April, overtaking OpenAI to become the top revenue generator with roughly a quarter of the training costs.

Compute spending is also being revised. Last October, Altman showed a slide during a livestream with the figure of 1.4 trillion dollars, saying this was OpenAI’s incremental compute commitment. Friar later privately clarified to investors: the actual plan is to spend $600 billion by 2030. In recent months, she has further warned management that if revenue growth cannot keep up, the company may be unable to fulfill future compute contracts.

Investment banks have told Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever goes public first can define this new industry, and the first mover will be prioritized for a large pool of waiting funds. Goldman Sachs is expected to act as the lead underwriter for the OpenAI IPO. OpenAI executives have reached out to exchanges to discuss the listing plan, but have not yet initiated formal procedures.

Friar previously had a similar experience at Square: in 2015, when the IPO market was sluggish and investor interest was insufficient, the company even considered withdrawing the IPO the night pricing was set. In the end, it went public at $9 per share, valuing the company at about $3 billion (half of the previous valuation), and released less than 10% of the shares. Three years later, the stock price surged.