OpenAI is leaning toward holding off its initial public offering until next year, three people involved in the company’s deliberations said, a turnabout that punctuates the uncertain future for fast-rising artificial intelligence giants.
The maker of ChatGPT hired bankers and lawyers with an eye toward a public offering as soon as the third or fourth quarter of this year, the people said. Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, pushed those advisers to find a way for the start-up to be valued at $1 trillion, up from the company’s last private valuation of $730 billion, according to the people involved, who did not want to be named because they were not permitted to speak publicly about internal deliberations.
But a cascade of recent developments has caused OpenAI’s executives to shift away from their most aggressive aspirations. Top of mind is what has happened to Elon Musk’s SpaceX after its I.P.O. this month. It was the largest ever, raising more than $85 billion and reaching a valuation of $1.77 trillion on its debut. Since then, SpaceX’s stock has been on a downward slide, as shares slumped to $153 at the end of the trading day on Thursday after reaching a high of $202 last week.
Global markets have also been choppy in recent weeks, with tech stocks dragging down indexes as investors question whether A.I. companies will live up to their sky-high promises.
That has caused OpenAI’s advisers, in conversations with the company over the past week, to caution that it may not find much enthusiasm from retail investors for its own shares, two of the people involved said.
OpenAI’s tapping the brakes on its I.P.O. plans could disappoint Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Public offerings from OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, which also said it was making plans for a Wall Street debut, could unleash a wave of generational wealth. OpenAI said this month that it had filed confidential paperwork with securities regulators to kick off the process for going public, but it did not commit publicly to any time frame.
A $1 trillion valuation in the public market, which would exceed the market capitalization of Walmart, would be staggering for OpenAI, a start-up that is not believed to have turned a profit and is aggressively spending on new data centers.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further beyond the company’s earlier statement.
OpenAI’s advisers presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public with a $1 trillion valuation, or lower the targeted valuation for a quicker I.P.O. Mr. Altman, said one person in contact with him on the topic, responded that any change to the trillion-dollar valuation was a nonstarter.
OpenAI is also grappling with other issues. Late last year, Sarah Friar, the company’s chief financial officer, said it was not pursuing an I.P.O. at the time and was focusing on shoring up its finances. Since then, it has continued to pour money into data centers and computing power, with no indications of slowing down.
The company is also spending heavily on marketing and recruiting high-profile engineering talent from companies like Meta and Google. It is searching for other lines of revenue, including dabbling with placing ads inside ChatGPT and striking e-commerce deals with companies like Shopify and Stripe that would allow people to buy things from online stores directly inside ChatGPT.
Those initiatives are still in early experimental phases, two OpenAI employees said. OpenAI reported roughly $13 billion in revenue in 2025, one of the people said, a number the company hopes to triple this year. OpenAI said this year that it was generating $2 billion in revenue each month.
But some OpenAI executives appeared to have changed their minds about an I.P.O. just a few months after Ms. Friar said the company was not looking to go public. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to go public by the end of 2026.
That surprised some employees because they thought the company was not on a strong enough financial footing, two people familiar with the company’s plans said.
OpenAI faces acute pressures. Anthropic, which offers a Claude Code tool for creating sophisticated software code, has had success selling its service to businesses. At the same time, Google’s Gemini, the tech giant’s flagship consumer A.I. product, has become popular with users.
After years of surging downloads of ChatGPT’s consumer app, those numbers have slowed and continue to hover around 900 million users, surprising investors who believed the company would easily hit one billion.
Over the past six months, OpenAI has undergone a near-complete overhaul. Under Fidji Simo, the chief executive of artificial general intelligence deployment, OpenAI has started dropping “side quests” — a term describing nonessential tasks in a role-playing game — including money-losing divisions like its video generator app, Sora. And to match Anthropic, OpenAI is building a sales team to push Codex, its coding product, to larger business customers.
Despite hesitation around an I.P.O., OpenAI executives believe the company is moving in the right direction, according to two employees. More than five million people use Codex on a weekly basis, the company said in a blog post this month.
The company also recently announced that it had more than two million business customers. And last week, the company recruited Noam Shazeer, away from Google, a hire widely seen as a coup across the insular A.I. research community. Mr. Shazeer was one of the authors of a 2017 paper introducing the “transformer architecture” in A.I. (or the T in ChatGPT).
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
