OpenAI’s CEO and CFO disagree on the timing of the 2026 IPO, with the CFO excluded from key financial meetings

Gate News, April 6—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately said on April 6 that this year he hopes the company can complete its IPO as early as the fourth quarter. However, CFO Sarah Friar told several colleagues that she believes the company will not yet be ready to be listed in 2026, citing reasons including the amount of process work and organizational effort required, as well as the financial risk posed by high-cost compute capacity purchase commitments.

On the internal management level, Altman has repeatedly excluded Friar from financial decision-making. In recent months, when he discussed server procurement with a top investor, he did not invite Friar; one attendee said her absence was “noticeable and awkward,” and therefore she had been involved in earlier meetings on the same topic. Starting in August last year, Friar no longer reported directly to Altman; instead, she began reporting to Fidji Simo, head of the applications business, breaking with the usual practice at large companies where the CFO typically reports directly to the CEO.

On the financial side, OpenAI has committed to investing more than $600 billion over the next five years in cloud servers. Internal projections suggest it will consume more than $200 billion in cash before achieving positive cash flow. The $122 billion financing commitment announced this week comes mainly from Amazon and Nvidia. Both of these companies are also OpenAI’s providers of cloud servers and chips, creating a circular capital arrangement. In the market, 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 begun: OpenAI has retained Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, and has held preliminary discussions with the IPO teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Altman privately said he hopes to go public earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing an IPO plan for this fourth quarter. Two executives later issued a joint statement saying they are “fully aligned on the compute strategy.”