OpenAI pushes IPO delay to 2027 as Sam Altman holds firm on $1 trillion valuation target

OpenAI Leans Toward Holding Up I.P.O. Until Next Year

Rob Copeland reported from New York, and Mike Isaac from San Francisco. OpenAI is leaning toward holding off its initial public offering until next year, three people involved in the company's deliberations said, a turnabout that punctuates the uncertain future for fast-rising artificial intelligence giants. The maker of ChatGPT hired bankers and lawyers with an eye toward a public offering as soon as the third or fourth quarter of this year, the people said. Sam Altman, the company's chief executive, pushed those advisers to find a way for the start-up to be valued at $1 trillion, up from the company's last private valuation of $730 million, according to the people involved, who did not want to be named because they were not permitted to speak publicly about internal deliberations. But a cascade of recent developments has caused OpenAI's executives to shift away from their most aggressive aspirations. Top of mind is what has happened to Elon Musk's SpaceX after its I.P.O. this month. It was the largest ever, raising more than $85 billion and reaching a valuation of $1.77 trillion on its debut. But since then, SpaceX's stock has been on a downward slide, as shares slumped to $153 at the end of the trading day on Thursday after reaching a high of $202 last week. Global markets have also been choppy in recent weeks, with tech stocks dragging down indexes as investors question whether A.I. companies will live up to their sky-high promises. That has caused OpenAI's advisers, in conversations with the company over the past week, to caution that it may not find much enthusiasm from retail investors for its own shares, two of the people involved said. OpenAI's tapping the brakes on its I.P.O. plans could disappoint Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Public offerings from OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, which also said it was making plans for a Wall Street debut, could unleash a wave of generational wealth. OpenAI said this month that it had filed confidential paperwork with securities regulators to kick off the process for going public, but it did not commit publicly to any time frame. A $1 trillion valuation in the public market, which would exceed the market capitalization of Walmart, would be staggering for OpenAI, a start-up that is not believed to have turned a profit and is aggressively spending on new data centers. An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further beyond the company's earlier statement. OpenAI's advisers presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public with a $1 trillion valuation, or lower the targeted valuation for a quicker I.P.O. Mr. Altman, said one person in contact with him on the topic, responded that any change to the trillion-dollar valuation was a nonstarter. OpenAI is also grappling with other issues. Late last year, Sarah Friar, the company's chief financial officer, said it was not pursuing an I.P.O. at the time and was focusing on shoring up its finances. Since then, it has continued to pour money into data centers and computing power, with no indications of slowing down. The company is also spending heavily on marketing and recruiting high-profile engineering talent from companies like Meta and Google. It is searching for other lines of revenue, including dabbling with placing ads inside ChatGPT and striking e-commerce deals with companies like Shopify and Stripe that would allow people to buy things from online stores directly inside ChatGPT. Those initiatives are still in early experimental phases, two OpenAI employees said. OpenAI reported roughly $13 billion in revenue in 2025, one of the people said, a number the company hopes to triple this year. OpenAI said this year that it was generating $2 billion in revenue each month. But some OpenAI executives appeared to have changed their minds about an I.P.O. just a few months after Ms. Friar said the company was not looking to go public. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to go public by the end of 2026. That surprised some employees because they thought the company was not on a strong enough financial footing, two people familiar with the company's plans said. OpenAI faces acute pressures. Anthropic, which offers a Claude Code tool for creating sophisticated software code, has had success selling its service to businesses. At the same time, Google's Gemini, the tech giant's flagship consumer A.I. product, has become popular with users. After years of surging downloads of ChatGPT's consumer app, those numbers have slowed and continue to hover around 900 million users, surprising investors who believed the company would easily hit one billion. Over the past six months, OpenAI has undergone a near-complete overhaul. Under Fidji Simo, the chief executive of artificial general intelligence deployment, OpenAI has started dropping "side quests" -- a term describing nonessential tasks in a role-playing game -- including money-losing divisions like its video generator app called Sora. And to match Anthropic, OpenAI is building a sales team to push Codex, its coding product, to larger business customers. Despite hesitation around an I.P.O., OpenAI executives believe the company is moving in the right direction, according to two employees. More than five million people use Codex on a weekly basis, the company said in a blog post this month. The company also recently announced it had more than two million business customers. And last week, the company recruited Noam Shazeer, away from Google, a hire that was widely seen as a coup across the insular A.I. research community. Mr. Shazeer was one of the authors of a 2017 paper introducing the "transformer architecture" in A.I. (or the "T" in ChatGPT). (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

OpenAI staggers GPT-5.6 rollout for government vetting, eyes 2027 IPO

OpenAI staggers GPT-5.6 rollout for government vetting, eyes 2027 IPO OpenAI Group PBC will roll out its next model, GPT-5.6, to a small group of partners rather than the public at the request of the Trump administration, the latest sign that Washington now wants to review frontier artificial intelligence models before they ship widely. The plan was disclosed by Chief Executive Sam Altman during a staff question-and-answer session on Wednesday, as detailed in a report from The Information. Altman reportedly told employees the federal government had asked the company to take the staggered approach and that it was the fastest path to a broad release. In a memo, he said the government would be "approving access customer by customer during this preview period," according to the report, adding that he hoped a wider rollout would follow "a couple of weeks later" if the preview went well. The arrangement mirrors how rival Anthropic PBC handled Mythos, a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it shared with select partners in April rather than releasing it publicly. The Trump administration later forced Anthropic to pull Mythos and a companion model offline earlier this month under an emergency export control directive citing national security, a confrontation that appears to have set the template for how the government now approaches cutting-edge releases. Reuters also reported the GPT-5.6 review and said the request grew out of talks with two agencies, the Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. What the customer-by-customer vetting involves and how long it runs, remains unclear. OpenAI and the White House have not commented on the reports publicly as of the time of writing. The episode points to a shift in who decides when powerful models reach the market. AI developers have spent years arguing over how openly to release their systems. Increasingly that call is being shaped in Washington, where officials worry that models capable of finding software vulnerabilities or breaking into hardened systems could spread to adversaries before safeguards are in place. OpenAI is navigating the new scrutiny as it weighs the timing of a stock market debut that would rank as one of the largest in history. The company is leaning toward waiting until 2027 to go public rather than filing this year, the New York Times reported. Recent market turbulence is a factor. SpaceX raised $75 billion in an initial public offering on June 11 that jumped on its debut before surrendering most of those gains, a wobble that has made OpenAI wary of weak demand from retail investors. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has pushed for the later date, pointing to the company's heavy cash burn, its compute commitments and the demands of public reporting, the Times said. Friar has favored a 2027 listing since at least last year, while Altman has leaned toward moving sooner. OpenAI completed the corporate restructuring needed to go public in October, converting its for-profit arm into the public benefit corporation now known as OpenAI Group PBC. It was reported at the time that the company was weighing a filing as soon as the second half of 2026 at a valuation of up to $1 trillion. The company closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation on March 31. A spokesperson previously told Reuters that "an IPO is not our focus, so we could not possibly have set a date."

OpenAI Weighs Delay of IPO as Tech Stock Volatility Rattles Advisers | PYMNTS.com

The artificial intelligence startup's advisers have told it that this volatility could reduce retail investors' enthusiasm for its IPO, according to the report. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing the firm's advisers to seek a $1 trillion valuation for the company, per the report. OpenAI announced June 8 that it had recently submitted a confidential S-1, a registration statement required for an IPO, to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company said in its announcement: "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best." Rival AI startup Anthropic said a week earlier, on June 1, that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the SEC about its IPO. Anthropic said in its announcement: "This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors." OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in a March funding round in which it raised $122 billion. The company said at the time that it was generating $2 billion in revenue per month, up from $1 billion per quarter at the end of 2024. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (June 23) that tech stocks, and particularly those of AI and chip companies, "fell hard" amid investor concerns about the cost of data centers and the uncertain future revenue prospects of AI. CNBC reported Tuesday that tech stocks suffered "deep losses" and that the sector's decline was driving a selloff of stocks around the world. Reuters reported Tuesday that sharp losses in semiconductor stocks drove the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 to more than one-week lows as investors questioned the growing amount of debt-funded spending on AI. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

OpenAI may delay blockbuster IPO to 2027 By Investing.com

Investing.com -- OpenAI is considering postponing its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) until 2027, according to a report Thursday from the New York Times, citing three people involved in the company's internal deliberations. The artificial intelligence heavyweight, which recently formalized its intentions by submitting a confidential S-1 filing with the SEC, had originally positioned itself for a public debut as early as the third or fourth quarter of this year. The potential delay highlights an internal tug-of-war over timing, market conditions, and a historic valuation target. The report said Chief Executive Sam Altman has fiercely pushed advisers to achieve a $1 trillion valuation for the ChatGPT maker -- a steep climb from its last private funding round, which pinned the company's valuation between $730 billion and $852 billion. For months, the momentum behind an OpenAI debut felt unstoppable. The company cleared a massive hurdle when Elon Musk's restrictive lawsuit was dismissed, and its core metrics have been explosive, with revenue hitting a historic $2 billion per month. Furthermore, the public markets have proven they have an appetite for mega-scale debuts. Just weeks ago, SpaceX shattered records with its June 2026 IPO, raising over $85 billion and capturing a staggering $1.77 trillion valuation at its debut. Many viewed SpaceX's blockbuster entry as a green light for OpenAI and rival Anthropic to execute a trifecta of trillion-dollar tech listings this year. For OpenAI to put on the brakes now signals a abrupt shift from aggressive expansion to defensive posturing. Despite eye-popping revenue growth, recent disclosures have given Wall Street a sobering reality check. OpenAI's audited financial documents recently revealed a staggering $38.5 billion net loss for last year, driven by a massive $34 billion spending spree on computing power, R&D, and structural corporate shifts. While SpaceX's IPO was a historical milestone, its immediate aftermath exposed a fickle market: SpaceX shares have since declined to $153 from a peak of $202 last week. That retreat, combined with broader tech sector volatility, has investors asking tough questions about whether the commercial returns of generative AI can keep pace with the astronomical infrastructure costs required to build it. Advisers have warned OpenAI executives that retail enthusiasm may be limited given the current market jitters. According to The Times, they presented Altman with two stark choices: According to a source in direct contact with Altman, the Chief Executive firmly rejected any compromise on the trillion-dollar figure. For now, OpenAI appears willing to wait out the storm to ensure it debuts on its own terms -- and at its own price tag.