OpenAI CFO Tells Employees Public Debut Coming by 2027

OpenAI “will be a public company in 2027,” if not sooner, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees Wednesday (Aug. 19) during an all-hands meeting, CNBC reported, citing unnamed sources.

Friar said OpenAI could make its public debut this year if “our business continues to inflect,” Friar said, according to the report.

She also told employees there is no reason to worry if Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, goes public first because “we are running our own race,” per the report.

Friar said that OpenAI’s revenue run rate is up 35% so far this quarter, its enterprise revenue run rate is up 50%, and its AI coding and work product has reached 20 million weekly active users, according to the report.

OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidential paperwork to go public. Bloomberg reported Aug. 13 that Anthropic is expected to reach the market as soon as this fall.

OpenAI said June 8 that it had submitted a confidential S-1, a registration statement required for an initial public offering, to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it had not decided on timing but that the move “gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

It was reported Tuesday (Aug. 18) that Anthropic’s sales topped those of OpenAI for the first time in the second quarter.

OpenAI told investors that its revenue grew by 18% and reached $6.7 billion in the second quarter, according to the report. Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled and reached $11.6 billion in the second quarter, per the report.

The report attributed the second quarter results to OpenAI’s ChatGPT seeing a slowdown in growth, while Anthropic’s Claude Code coding tool saw continued success.

OpenAI told investors that its growth rate has accelerated during the current quarter, following the launch of new AI models in July, per the report.

OpenAI told the public Tuesday that it is deliberately slowing down, with a two-week pause in reinforcement learning training on models intended for deployment while the company hardened its research environments and expanded monitoring coverage. The company’s largest planned frontier training run remains on hold.

“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” OpenAI said in a blog post. “We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling.”