ChatGPT's Weekly Active Users Fall Short of 1 Billion, Revenue Leadership Overtaken, OpenAI CFO Suggests IPO Delayed Until 2027

According to Watchtower Beating monitoring, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar privately suggested delaying the IPO to 2027, citing the company's failure to meet the financial reporting standards of a public company. CEO Altman, on the other hand, is eager to go public as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026. While the two had previously issued a joint statement claiming to be "completely aligned" on the issue of computational power procurement, several insiders have confirmed the existence of this disagreement.

At the heart of the disagreement is a growth slowdown. At the end of last year, OpenAI set a target of 1 billion weekly active users for ChatGPT, which has not been achieved, and the company has not yet announced a breakthrough in reaching this milestone. In December 2025, the weekly active users were at 800 million, rising to 900 million in February 2026, showing a significant deceleration in growth on a high base. Google's Gemini has been gaining market share on the consumer end, while Anthropic's Claude Code is gaining traction in the developer market. OpenAI has missed several monthly revenue targets since the beginning of this year. The annualized revenue is approximately $250 billion, while Anthropic has already surpassed $300 billion in April, overtaking OpenAI in revenue with about a quarter of the training costs.

There are also adjustments in computational power spending. Altman displayed a slide during a live stream last October with the figure of $14 trillion, indicating this as OpenAI's commitment to additional computational power. Friar later privately clarified to investors that the actual plan is to spend $6 trillion by 2030. In recent months, she has further warned the management team that if the revenue growth rate does not keep up, the company may not be able to fulfill future computational power contracts.

Investment banks have informed Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever goes public first will be able to define this new industry, with the first mover gaining access to a significant amount of waiting capital. Goldman Sachs is expected to act as the lead underwriter in the OpenAI IPO. OpenAI executives have engaged with exchanges to discuss the listing plan but have not yet initiated the formal process.

Friar had a similar experience at Square before: during the 2015 IPO market slump with little investor interest, there was consideration of withdrawing the IPO pricing on the listing night. Eventually, the IPO proceeded at $9 per share, with a valuation of around $30 billion (half of the previous round valuation), releasing less than 10% of the shares. The stock price surged three years later.