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

MeNews · 2026-04-06T04:43:17+00:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that he hopes to go public before the fourth quarter of this year, but CFO Sarah Friar believes the company will only be ready by 2026. The company has committed to investing $600 billion in cloud servers, which will put significant pressure on future cash flow, and Friar has been excluded from discussions with top investors. Internal executive disagreements continue, and preparations for going public have already begun, with initial discussions held with law firms and investment banks.

MeNews

2026-04-06 04:43:17

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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 told several colleagues that she believes the company will not yet be ready to go public in 2026, citing reasons including the amount of process and organizational work required, as well as the financial risks brought by high-cost compute 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; an attendee said her absence was “noticeable and awkward,” so she was involved in a meeting on the same topic earlier. Starting in August of last year, Friar stopped reporting directly to Altman and began reporting to Fidji Simo, head of the applications business, breaking the usual practice in large companies where the CFO is typically directly responsible 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 forecasts say it will burn more than $200 billion in cash before achieving positive cash flow. The $122 billion financing commitment announced this week mainly comes from Amazon and Nvidia, and both companies are also OpenAI’s suppliers of cloud servers and chips, creating a revolving capital arrangement. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI as the preferred AI model for enterprise and developer markets, and OpenAI’s revenue growth rate has also been slowing. IPO preparations have quietly begun: OpenAI has retained the two law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and held preliminary discussions with the IPO teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Altman privately said he hopes to list earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing its IPO plan for the fourth quarter of this year. Two executives later issued a joint statement saying they are “fully aligned on the compute strategy.” (Source: ChainCatcher)

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