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

ME News Update, April 6 (UTC+8). According to market sources, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately said this year that he hopes the company can complete an IPO as early as the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, CFO Sarah Friar has told several colleagues that she believes the company will not yet be in a position to go public in 2026, citing reasons including the workload involved in the required processes and organizational work, as well as financial risks brought by high-cost computing power procurement commitments. Internally, 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 to participate; one attendee described her absence as “noticeable and awkward,” and therefore she was involved in earlier meetings on the same topic.

Since last August, Friar has stopped reporting directly to Altman and instead reports 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 front, OpenAI has committed to investing more than $600 billion over the next five years in cloud servers, and internal forecasts indicate it will burn more than $200 billion in cash before achieving positive cash flow. 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 overtaken OpenAI as the preferred AI model for the enterprise and developer market, and OpenAI’s revenue growth rate is also slowing.

IPO preparations have quietly begun: OpenAI has retained the law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, and has held preliminary discussions with Goldman Sachs’s IPO team and Morgan Stanley’s IPO team. Altman privately said he hopes to go public earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing a fourth-quarter IPO plan. The two executives later issued a joint statement saying they are “fully aligned on the compute strategy.”

(Source: ChainCatcher)