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 said this year that he hopes the company can complete an IPO as early as the fourth quarter. CFO Sarah Friar also told several colleagues that she believes the company is not yet ready to list in 2026, citing factors including the required process and organizational workload, as well as the financial risks arising from high-value commitments for compute infrastructure procurement. Internally, Altman has repeatedly excluded Friar from financial decision-making. In recent months, when discussing server procurement with a top investor, he did not invite Friar to participate; one attendee said her absence was “noticeable and awkward,” so she had been involved in earlier meetings on the same topic. Since August last year, Friar no longer reports directly to Altman; instead, she reports to Fidji Simo, the head of the application business, breaking with the typical practice in large companies where the CFO reports directly to the CEO.

On the financial front, OpenAI has committed to investing more than $600 billion in cloud servers over the next five years, and internal projections indicate that it will burn through more than $200 billion in cash before reaching positive cash flow. The $122 billion financing commitment announced this week comes mainly from Amazon and NVIDIA—both of which are also OpenAI’s suppliers of cloud servers and chips—forming a circular 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 tasked the law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz, and has held preliminary discussions with the IPO teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Altman privately said he hopes to go public earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing its IPO plan for this fourth quarter. The two executives later released a joint statement saying they are “completely aligned on compute strategy.” (Source: ChainCatcher)