OpenAI is leaning toward holding off on an IPO until next year

OpenAI is leaning toward delaying its initial public offering until next year, three people involved in the company’s negotiations said, a turnaround that underscores the uncertain future of the fast-growing artificial intelligence giants.

The ChatGPT maker has hired bankers and lawyers with an eye on an IPO as early as the third or fourth quarter of this year, the people said. Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, has been pushing those advisers to find a way to value the start-up at $1 trillion, up from the company’s last private valuation of $730 billion, according to the people involved, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal negotiations.

But a cascade of recent developments has caused OpenAI executives to deviate from their most aggressive aspirations. Most important is what happened to Elon Musk’s SpaceX after its IPO this month. It was the largest ever, raising more than $85 billion and reaching a valuation of $1.77 trillion at its debut. Since then, SpaceX shares have been falling, with shares falling to $153 in late trading on Thursday after hitting a high of $202 last week.

Global markets have also been jittery in recent weeks, with tech stocks dragging indexes down as investors doubted whether AI companies would live up to their lofty promises.

That prompted OpenAI advisers to warn in talks with the company last week that it might not find much enthusiasm for its own stock among retail investors, two of the people involved said.

OpenAI holding back on its IPO plans could disappoint Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Public offerings from OpenAI and its rival Anthropic, which has also said it plans to debut on Wall Street, could unleash a wave of generational wealth. OpenAI said this month that it had submitted confidential paperwork to securities regulators to begin the disclosure process, but did not publicly commit to any time frame.

A public market valuation of $1 trillion, which would exceed Walmart’s market cap, would be stunning for OpenAI, a startup that is not believed to be profitable and is spending aggressively on new data centers.

An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment further beyond the company’s earlier statement.

OpenAI’s advisers offered the company’s executives the option to wait until 2027 to go public at a $1 trillion valuation or lower the target valuation for a faster IPO. Mr. Altman said one person he contacted about the matter responded that any change in the trillion-dollar valuation was unrealistic.

OpenAI also faces other problems. Late last year, Sarah Friar, the company’s chief financial officer, said it was not pursuing an IPO 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 signs of slowing down.

The company is also spending heavily on marketing and recruiting high-profile engineering talent from companies like Meta and Google. He’s looking for other lines of revenue, including dabbling in placing ads in ChatGPT and making e-commerce deals with companies like Shopify and Stripe that would allow people to buy things from online stores right in ChatGPT.

These initiatives are still in the early experimental stages, two OpenAI employees said. OpenAI has reported revenue of about $13 billion in 2025, one of the people said, a figure the company hopes to triple this year. OpenAI he said this year, it generated $2 billion in revenue every month.

But some OpenAI executives appear to have changed their minds about the IPO just months after Ms. Friar said the company did not want 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 didn’t have strong enough financial footing, said two people familiar with the company’s plans.

OpenAI is facing acute pressures. Anthropic, which offers the Claude Code tool for creating sophisticated software code, has successfully sold its services to enterprises. At the same time, users loved Google’s Gemini, the tech giant’s flagship consumer AI product.

After years of growth in downloads for ChatGPT’s consumer app, those numbers have slowed and remain hovering around 900 million users, surprising investors who believed the company would easily reach one billion.

Over the past six months, OpenAI has undergone an almost complete overhaul. Under the leadership of Fidji Simo, general manager of artificial general intelligence adoption, OpenAI has begun to shed “side tasks” — a term describing nonessential tasks in a role-playing game — including money-losing divisions such as its video generator app, Sora. And to match Anthropic, OpenAI is building a sales team to market Codex, its coding product, to larger business customers.

Despite the hesitation about the IPO, OpenAI’s management believes the company is moving in the right direction, according to two employees. More than five million people use Codex weekly, the company said blog post this month.

The company also recently announced that it has more than two million business customers. And last week company recruited Noam Shazeer, gone from Google, a hire widely seen as a coup in the island’s AI research community. Mr. Shazeer co-authored a 2017 paper that introduced the “transformer architecture” in AI (or T in ChatGPT).

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims.)