OpenAI CFO privately questioned the timing of the 2026 IPO, and Altman excluded him from key financial meetings.

ME News message, April 6 (UTC+8). According to market sources, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately said this year that he hopes the company can complete its IPO as early as the fourth quarter. CFO Sarah Friar also told multiple colleagues that she believes the company will not yet be in a position to go public in 2026. The reasons she cited include the required processes and the organizational workload, as well as the financial risk brought by high-value compute-capacity procurement commitments. Internally, Altman has repeatedly excluded Friar from financial decision-making. In recent months, when he discussed server procurement with a top-tier investor, he did not invite Friar to participate. One attendee said her absence was “noticeable and awkward,” which is why she had participated in meetings on the same topic previously.

Since August last year, Friar no longer reported directly to Altman; instead, she began reporting to Fidji Simo, head of the application business, breaking the usual practice at large companies where the CFO is directly responsible to the CEO. From a financial standpoint, OpenAI has committed to investing more than $600 billion in cloud servers over the next five years. Internal forecasts predict that more than $200 billion in cash will be consumed before positive cash flow is achieved. The $122 billion funding commitment announced this week mainly comes from Amazon and NVIDIA—both of which are also OpenAI’s suppliers of cloud servers and chips—forming a circular capital arrangement.

Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI to become the preferred AI model for the enterprise and developer markets, and OpenAI’s revenue growth rate has also been slowing. IPO preparations have quietly started: OpenAI has retained the law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, and has held preliminary talks with the IPO teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Altman privately stated that he hopes to go public earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing a fourth-quarter IPO plan. Afterward, the two executives issued a joint statement saying they are “completely aligned on the compute strategy.” (Source: ChainCatcher)