A financial reckoning is looming for OpenAI, experts told Decrypt, following a report by The Wall Street Journal that the company failed to meet key internal objectives related to ChatGPT users and revenue. This shortfall comes as CFO Sarah Friar has privately raised concerns over escalating compute costs potentially surpassing incoming revenue.
Friar’s warnings emerged after OpenAI did not achieve its target of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year-end, a milestone that went unmet and unannounced, causing investor unease, reported The Wall Street Journal.
“Once everything settles, companies will realize something they’ve long known: much of the work still relies on human judgment, collaboration, and context that AI cannot yet replicate,” Alice Li, Investment Partner at Foresight Ventures, told Decrypt. She views this pressure as an internal tech sector rebalancing rather than a sign of broader economic downturn.
OpenAI has committed roughly $600 billion in future data-center spending through aggressive deals based on Sam Altman’s theory that compute scarcity limits AI growth. Friar reportedly expressed concern to other executives about whether revenue would grow quickly enough to cover these contracts, according to the report.
Directors have reportedly become more critical of data-center agreements and questioned why Altman continues pursuing additional computing capacity despite a slowdown.
Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI on the share trading platform Forge Global, where it now trades at roughly $1 trillion against OpenAI’s approximately $880 billion. This is the first instance its competitor commands a higher implied valuation, according to Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques.
Markus Levin, co-founder of DePIN network XYO, told Decrypt that interpreting these numbers as indicative of an impending market crash misreads the data. He highlighted that by late 2025, about 84% of the global working-age population had yet to use generative AI tools, and only approximately 44.8 million people held paying AI subscriptions.
“Viewing a slow adoption curve as evidence of a looming market collapse shows tunnel vision against what the data suggests,” Levin said. He pointed out that disruptions are real but narrowly focused, driven more by tech-sector over-hiring cycles and cost adjustments than widespread automation.
“A rational repricing phase seems unavoidable—market sentiment often precedes fundamentals, necessitating recalibration of expectations,” Li remarked. She sees current valuations as priced ahead of time rather than fundamentally flawed, with fundamentals likely to align if development continues steadily.
Decrypt has sought comments from OpenAI on these matters.
Pavel Bezhin, CFO at AI firm Napoleon IT, told Decrypt that this pattern echoes previous technology cycles and the outcome is not certain. “Throughout history, such breakthroughs have often preceded crises and recessions but never directly caused them,” he stated. He referenced the dot-com crash as a pertinent lesson: outdated economic models failing to adapt lead to collapse, not the technology itself.
“If global financial institutions have learned from the dot-com crash, recession discussions will remain cautionary tales rather than imminent threats,” Bezhin added.
OpenAI’s IPO ambitions are caught in this turmoil. Altman is pushing for a public listing by year-end, while Friar has warned that internal controls do not yet meet public market reporting standards. On prediction platform Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users assign a 64% likelihood to Anthropic conducting its IPO before OpenAI.
Separately, Altman spent last week apologizing to Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s community after OpenAI admitted to banning a ChatGPT account linked to a February mass shooting suspect without notifying law enforcement.