OpenAI is grappling with significant financial and operational challenges after missing key internal targets for ChatGPT. The Wall Street Journal reported the company fell short of its goal for one billion weekly active users and its annual revenue target. This has raised concerns from CFO Sarah Friar about covering the company’s massive future data-center spending commitments, which total roughly $600 billion.
OpenAI missed internal targets for both weekly active users and annual revenue for ChatGPT, unsettling some investors. CFO Sarah Friar has warned that revenue may not grow fast enough to pay for future computing contracts the company has secured.
Friar raised the alarm after the company fell short of its goal of reaching one billion weekly active users by the end of last year. Board directors have reportedly grown more probing about the data-center deals pursued by CEO Sam Altman.
Anthropic has quietly overtaken OpenAI on share trading platform Forge Global, where it now trades at roughly $1 trillion against OpenAI’s approximately $880 billion. This marks the first time its rival has commanded a higher implied valuation, according to reports.
Experts are divided on whether these stumbles signal a broader market correction. Alice Li, Investment Partner at Foresight Ventures, framed current valuations as priced ahead of time rather than fundamentally broken.
Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO, noted that by the end of 2025, roughly 84% of the world’s working-age population had still not used generative AI tools. “Conflating a slow, uneven adoption curve with an imminent market reckoning reflects a tunnel vision the data is pushing back against,” Levin said.
Pavel Bezhin, CFO at Napoleon IT, pointed to the dot-com crash as a relevant lesson for the current situation. “If global financial institutions have learned the right lessons from the dot-com crash, discussions about recession and systemic collapse will remain nothing more than cautionary tales,” he added.
OpenAI’s IPO ambitions are caught in the middle, with Altman pushing for a public listing by year-end. On prediction market Myriad, users place a 64% chance on Anthropic conducting its IPO before OpenAI.
