‘Another Fundraise’: OpenAI’s CFO Reportedly Downplays Importance of IPO to Staff

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees in a Wednesday all-hands meeting that an IPO is 'not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise,' downplaying the importance of going public, according to CNBC. Friar noted the company raised $122 billion in March, giving it flexibility, and acknowledged that rival Anthropic may go public in September, but said 'we are running our own race.' The remarks come as OpenAI reported second-quarter revenue growth of only 18% quarter-over-quarter, compared to Anthropic's revenue more than doubling, and as the company slows model development to meet safety standards.

Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI was once the CEO of a company when it went public: Nextdoor https://www.wsj.com/tech/nextdoor-to-complete-move-to-go-public-11636372800 . So maybe that gives her credibility these days as she reportedly acts like an IPO for OpenAI is no biggie. “The IPO is not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise,” she said in a Wednesday all-hands meeting, according to a CNBC story https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/08/openai-confidentially-files-for-ipo-prepping-wall-street-for-ai-debut.html sourced to two anonymous insiders. “We raised $122 billion in March, and that gives us flexibility,” Friar reportedly also said. In another report from June, CNBC wrote that OpenAI had confidentially filed a prospectus with the SEC https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/08/openai-confidentially-files-for-ipo-prepping-wall-street-for-ai-debut.html . “As you know we are confidentially under file, and Anthropic is also under file,” Friar reportedly told OpenAI employees at the Wednesday all-hands. “There is a chance they pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September. That’s OK, we are running our own race,” she added, according to CNBC. OpenAI is slowing down the development of new models, according to a Tuesday blog post https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/ . That blog post coincided with reports of another possibly slowdown: the slowing of OpenAI’s journey to profitability, according to the Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-second-quarter-sales-show-tepid-growth-compared-with-anthropic-5cb42998 . It apparently divulged to investors that second quarter revenue growth had been a relatively minuscule 18% over the first quarter. The revenue of its chief rival Anthropic more than doubled https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-surpasses-openai-q2-revenue-121706311.html over that same time period. OpenAI has seen a rash of leadership departures lately, something company president Greg Brockman dismissed Monday https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/openai-brockman-leadership-changes.html as not unusual, and only noticeable because OpenAI is such a high-profile company. It has also recently restructured its staffing around safety and ethics, which has also involved departures https://gizmodo.com/yet-another-safety-leader-at-openai-has-left-2000784403 . OpenAI has also played a starring role in a series of news stories about model misbehavior. OpenAI models “ broke containment https://gizmodo.com/hugging-face-said-last-week-it-was-attacked-an-unreleased-openai-model-did-it-openai-now-says-2000788761 ” during an evaluation exercise, gaining internet access they weren’t supposed to have, and breaking into the AI resource repository Hugging Face to access test answers in order to improve their eval scores. Amid shifting political attitudes toward AI regulation among members of the Trump Administration, Sam Altman traveled to Washington D.C. last month https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-openai-previews-astra-ai-model-dc to show lawmakers what his company’s latest model could do. In yesterday’s blog post, however, OpenAI wrote about the need to delay the release of Astra and potentially other future models as it creates more stringent safety standards. “We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling,” OpenAI wrote https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/ .