OpenAI is confronting a growing gap between its ambitions and its financial reality, according to experts who spoke with Decrypt. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the company fell short of key internal targets for ChatGPT users and revenue. CFO Sarah Friar privately warned that ballooning compute costs could soon outpace incoming money.
Missed Milestones and Investor Unease
Friar raised the alarm after OpenAI failed to reach its goal of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of last year. The company never announced that milestone, and its miss unsettled some investors. “When the dust settles, I think companies will find out something they already knew—a lot of the work still depends on human judgment, collaboration, and contextual understanding that AI can’t yet replicate,” Alice Li, Investment Partner at Foresight Ventures, told Decrypt. Li sees the current pressure as an internal rebalancing within tech, not a sign of a broader economic downturn.
Soaring Compute Costs and Competitive Pressure
OpenAI has locked in roughly $600 billion in future compute costs. Friar reportedly told other leaders she worries revenue may not grow fast enough to cover those contracts. Board directors have grown more probing about spending. Meanwhile, rival Anthropic has quietly overtaken OpenAI on share trading platform Forge Global, where it now trades at roughly $1 trillion versus OpenAI’s approximately $880 billion—the first time Anthropic has commanded a higher implied valuation, according to Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques.
Markus Levin, co-founder of DePIN network XYO, told Decrypt that reading a market crash into these numbers misreads the data. He noted that by the end of 2025, about 84% of the world’s working-age population still hadn’t used generative AI tools. Only around 44.8 million people held paying AI subscriptions globally. “Conflating a slow, uneven adoption curve with an imminent market reckoning reflects a tunnel vision the data is pushing back against,” Levin said. The disruption, he added, is real but narrowly concentrated, driven more by tech-sector over-hiring and cost corrections than by broad automation.
Lessons from Past Tech Cycles
Some observers see a familiar pattern. “A rational repricing phase is almost inevitable—market sentiment tends to move ahead of fundamentals, and expectations need to be recalibrated,” Li said. She frames current valuations as priced ahead of time rather than fundamentally broken, with fundamentals likely to catch up if capability development stays on track.
Pavel Bezhin, CFO at AI development company Napoleon IT, told Decrypt the pattern is familiar from earlier technology cycles. “In human history, such breakthroughs have indeed often preceded crises and recessions, but they have never been their direct cause,” he said. Bezhin pointed to the dot-com crash as the relevant lesson: economic systems built on outdated models fail to adapt, and it is that failure, not the technology itself, that triggers collapse. “If global financial institutions have learned the right lessons from the dot-com crash, discussions about recession and systemic collapse will remain nothing more than cautionary tales,” he added.
IPO Ambitions and Other Headaches
OpenAI’s IPO ambitions are caught in the middle. CEO Sam Altman is pushing for a public listing by year-end, while Friar has privately cautioned that the company’s internal controls aren’t ready for the reporting standards public markets demand. On prediction market Myriad, owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users place a 64% chance on Anthropic carrying out its IPO before OpenAI.
Away from the boardroom, Altman spent last week apologizing to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI acknowledged it had banned a ChatGPT account tied to the suspect in a February mass shooting that killed eight people without ever notifying law enforcement. Decrypt has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
