OpenAI Delays IPO to 2027 on Cash Burn and Slow Growth as Anthropic Nears $1 Trillion Valuation

Several people involved in the discussions said that in recent months, some of OpenAI's major investors privately expressed concerns that the startup was burning cash too quickly and that revenue growth could not keep pace. Other investors chose to diversify risk by also putting money into Anthropic. The company had originally hoped to complete its IPO before Anthropic. One week after Anthropic filed its IPO application, OpenAI also submitted listing documents but did not lock in a timeline, saying "it is too early for an IPO" because "many strategic goals are easier to advance as a non-listed company."

Thanks to the success of its coding tool Claude Code, Anthropic's recent revenue growth and corporate valuation have both surpassed OpenAI, with its valuation now approaching $1 trillion. Sources said Anthropic is accelerating its autumn IPO plans, opening communications with potential investors and emphasizing that it has taken the lead over ChatGPT developer OpenAI. OpenAI's flagship consumer product ChatGPT has seen significantly slower growth. Fidji Simo, Sam Altman's planned successor, departed, prompting a reshuffling of responsibilities among executives under the CEO. The sales team has had to pay a high price to win high-value enterprise clients through bulk discounts and various concessions.

Altman posted on X earlier this month: "Over the past twelve months, we haven't delivered our best results, and the main responsibility lies with me. The team is working on major projects, and everyone will see surprises soon." OpenAI's difficulties in competing for industry leadership stem from management's earlier misjudgment of the AI market's direction. Altman initially bet the company's growth on ChatGPT, gambling that as artificial intelligence becomes deeply integrated into daily life, more users would pay subscriptions for the chatbot. However, Claude Code's overnight success clearly proved that the bigger opportunity lies in selling tools to high-end software developers and large enterprises that employ many programmers.

While OpenAI pushed ahead with various attention-grabbing projects — from video generation models and consumer devices to self-developed chips — smaller, more strategically focused competitors seized market gaps and launched hit coding tools to overtake it. To catch up with its top rival, OpenAI has released multiple new models focused on coding and professional office scenarios, appointing President Greg Brockman to lead the product line revamp. The company also partnered with Amazon to sell AI tools to the cloud giant's customers, and hired former Slack CEO Dennis Dresser as its first chief revenue officer. This week, Altman was also in Washington meeting with Trump administration officials and members of Congress to preview new models, as the US government discusses how to further regulate the AI industry.

In fall 2024, OpenAI launched a series of reasoning models capable of step-by-step reasoning and problem-solving, a capability well-suited to code writing. But when training the models, researchers targeted high school competition-style programming problems rather than the fragmented, open-ended complex engineering tasks of real software development. Months later, Anthropic took a completely different approach, launching the reasoning model Sonnet 3.7. In a February 2025 blog post, the company said its research focus was on "real business scenario tasks," aligned with how enterprises actually use AI.

Initially, Codex's problems were seen as short-term volatility. ChatGPT's weekly active users kept climbing and the company's valuation rose in tandem. In August 2025, OpenAI recruited Simo, former CEO of Instacart, to prepare for a highly anticipated IPO. But in hindsight, Codex's cold reception was just a warning sign of a series of crises.

Many developers reported that Codex was slow and cumbersome to use, forcing OpenAI to adjust the product design to emulate Anthropic. The company also formed a dedicated "coding ninja" team to ensure new models were designed according to actual customer needs. Meanwhile, executives were distracted by other urgent matters: fending off talent poaching by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and repairing the deteriorating relationship with largest investor Microsoft. Large amounts of valuable computing resources were invested in projects that ultimately failed, including the video generation app Sora. By the time the company redirected resources to Codex, the market opportunity had been lost.

Sources said the company learned that Anthropic was in talks with chip startup Cerebras, which develops specialized chips capable of processing coding tasks at high speed. OpenAI quickly finalized a cooperation agreement, trying to block the competitor. But this still could not stop the decline. During the December Christmas holiday, Altman vacationed on St. Barts in the Caribbean, while programmers in San Francisco stayed up all night testing Anthropic's new model Opus 4.5, marveling at its power.

Meanwhile, Google's consumer chatbot surged in popularity and ChatGPT's user growth suddenly slowed. OpenAI had set a target of 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025, initially missed it, and only recently achieved it. Soon after, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in both revenue growth and valuation. As its position as AI leader came under attack, OpenAI found itself fighting on two fronts. OpenAI executives had pitched a partnership to Blackstone executives to form a new company selling AI tools to Blackstone's portfolio companies, but Blackstone declined and instead chose to work with Anthropic on a project. OpenAI subsequently reached agreements with other private equity firms.

By March 2026, some OpenAI employees were frustrated and repeatedly asked an executive about the company's future direction. The internal questions read: "Anthropic has far fewer employees and a much lower market value than us, but whether in technology direction or industry opinion, they always define the rules and we can only react passively. Why does this situation keep repeating?" Another question was more pointed: "If Anthropic's revenue surpasses ours, what impact will that have on the company's IPO plans?" Simo recently left due to deteriorating health. She commented that the company had been chasing various side projects, losing strategic focus, and falling behind rivals in both technology development and product delivery. "Anthropic's revenue performance is a direct measure of how well its mission is being executed. They are penetrating many core areas of the economy, and that should serve as a wake-up call for us."

OpenAI is now trying to seize momentum from recent products to turn the tide in the AI race. The company recently launched a super app integrating Codex, ChatGPT and a web browser; the company said the new product and the standalone Codex app together have surpassed 10 million users. This month, OpenAI released a new model, GPT 5.6 Sol, which quickly gained favor among developers; in response, Anthropic expanded access to its flagship model Fable to compete.