Regarding the timing of the IPO, there is an internal disagreement at OpenAI: Altman hopes for the fourth quarter, while the CFO believes it is not yet ready.

The internal tension within OpenAI between an aggressive expansion path and financial prudence is coming to light.

According to The Information, CEO Sam Altman privately said he wants to complete an IPO as early as this year’s fourth quarter, while CFO Sarah Friar earlier this year expressed a sharply different view to colleagues, saying the company is not yet ready to be listed.

Friar’s concerns go straight to the company’s financial reality: OpenAI has committed to spending more than $600 billion over the next five years to rent servers, while warning investors that its cash burn through 2030 will exceed its prior forecast by more than twice—meaning the burn rate could exceed $200 billion.

A person who spoke with Friar said, whether the company’s slowing revenue growth can support such a spending commitment remains in doubt. Meanwhile, competitor Anthropic is eroding OpenAI’s market share, further intensifying external pressure.

In response to reports of a rift in the relationship between the two, Altman and Friar jointly issued a statement saying the two are “fully aligned” on the point that they will “make access to durable compute a core strategy for OpenAI,” and added that over the past year or more, both have “directly participated in every major compute decision.”

Disagreement over the IPO timeline

Despite Friar’s reservations, OpenAI has already begun work on preparations for an IPO. The company has hired the law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, and has made informal contact with the IPO underwriting teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Altman’s desire to go public also carries clear competitive motivation. He privately said he hopes OpenAI’s IPO will be completed before Anthropic, which is currently discussing listing in the fourth quarter of this year. If the IPO goes through, the deal could rank among the largest IPOs in history.

Friar’s resistance to a rapid listing is not without precedent. Last November, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she publicly said the IPO was “not currently on the agenda,” because the company was still working on “adjusting the company to a state that matches its current scale.”

The internal power structure has quietly shifted

At the level of organizational structure, an unusual change happened some time ago: since August of last year, Friar no longer reports directly to Altman, and instead reports to Fidji Simo, head of applications business. Having the CFO report directly to executives other than the CEO is a rare arrangement in large companies.

Multiple people close to the two told us that Altman has excluded Friar from certain important discussions involving financial planning.

One case involved Altman’s recent discussion with a major OpenAI investor about server spending—where Friar was not invited, even though she had attended a meeting earlier on the same topic.

A participant said her absence was “conspicuous and awkward.” Another person said that earlier this year, at an executive-level meeting involving major financial decisions, Friar was similarly not invited.

Billion-dollar compute commitments hide financial risk

OpenAI’s current compute spending plan is unprecedented in scale.

OpenAI has already signed server lease agreements totaling about $665 billion, covering:

Oracle (about $300 billion, five years, starting in 2027);

Microsoft ($250 billion, through 2032);

Amazon Web Services ($138 billion, eight years);

CoreWeave ($22 billion, five years);

Cerebras ($10 billion);

and several other partners.

These commitments are not ordinary cloud computing contracts. Friar previously explained that AI data center construction cycles can last several years, and OpenAI needs to book capacity in advance.

“I have to make a decision today to ensure we have enough compute in 2028, 2029, and even 2030. If I don’t place orders today, the data centers won’t exist.”

In one case, according to The Information’s earlier report, OpenAI and Oracle signed a risk-sharing agreement over cost overruns for data center construction, which is a rare term in cloud customer contracts. Currently, OpenAI has put aside its earlier plans to build data centers in-house.

Dual pressure on revenue growth and cash burn

The external competitive landscape is tightening rapidly. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in selling AI models to enterprise and application developers, and Google’s Gemini continues to erode ChatGPT’s dominant position in the consumer chatbot market.

OpenAI raised its revenue expectations for the next five years by 27% this year, but at the same time it privately told investors that its cash burn through 2030 will be more than twice the value predicted last summer.

In addition, the company told investors that last year’s gross margin was lower than expected because user demand exceeded expectations, forcing the company to temporarily procure compute at higher prices.

In February this year, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said bluntly on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast that the dangers of investing in data centers ahead of schedule are real—his wording suggesting OpenAI:

“If I get my assessment wrong—by even just a year—you go bankrupt. My impression is that some companies haven’t seriously done the math, and they don’t truly understand the risk they’re taking on.”

This closely echoes the concerns that have emerged internally from Friar. One person who works closely with the two described the CFO’s situation in this way: “She’s dealing with a founder with big ambitions who wants to go all-in on spending. That’s a very difficult job.”

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