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

ME News Report, April 6 (UTC+8), according to market sources, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately stated this year that he hopes the company will complete an IPO as early as the fourth quarter; CFO Sarah Friar has told several colleagues that she believes the company is not yet ready to go public in 2026, citing reasons including the workload of processes and organization, as well as financial risks from large-scale computing power procurement commitments. Internally, Altman has repeatedly excluded Friar from financial decision-making. In recent months, he did not invite Friar to participate in discussions with a top investor about server procurement, with an attendee describing her absence as “noticeable and awkward,” whereas she had participated in previous meetings on the same topic. Since August last year, Friar no longer reports directly to Altman, instead reporting to the head of application business, Fidji Simo, breaking the usual practice of CFOs in large companies reporting directly to the CEO. On the financial front, OpenAI has committed to investing over $600 billion in cloud servers over the next five years, with internal forecasts predicting that more than $200 billion in cash will be consumed 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 cloud server and chip suppliers, forming a cycle capital arrangement. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI to become the preferred AI model for enterprise and developer markets, and OpenAI’s revenue growth is also slowing. IPO preparations have quietly begun: OpenAI has engaged the law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and has had preliminary discussions with the IPO teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Altman privately expressed a desire to go public earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing an IPO plan for the fourth quarter of this year. The two executives later issued a joint statement saying they are “completely aligned on compute strategy.” (Source: ChainCatcher)