OpenAI’s growth story is colliding with financial reality, according to industry sources — and the fallout is already echoing through private markets and prediction platforms favored by crypto traders.
What happened
- The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI missed internal targets for ChatGPT users and revenue. CFO Sarah Friar privately warned company leaders that rapidly rising compute costs could outstrip revenue, after OpenAI failed to hit its goal of 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of last year — a milestone it never announced or reached.
- The company has also locked in roughly $600 billion in future data‑center spending from multi‑year deals made under Sam Altman’s thesis that compute scarcity would be the main constraint on AI progress. Friar reportedly told colleagues she’s worried revenue won’t grow fast enough to cover those contracts, prompting tougher board scrutiny over the deals and Altman’s continued push for more capacity.
Market signals and valuations
- Private trading on Forge Global shows Anthropic quietly overtaking OpenAI in implied value: Anthropic now trades at about $1 trillion versus OpenAI’s roughly $880 billion, per Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques — the first time Anthropic has commanded a higher implied valuation.
- On Myriad, the prediction market owned by Decrypt’s parent Dastan, users put a 64% probability on Anthropic IPO-ing before OpenAI — a sign how traders are betting on who will reach the public markets first.
Voices from the industry
- Alice Li, investment partner at Foresight Ventures, told Decrypt this looks like a sectoral “internal rebalancing” rather than the start of a broad macro downturn. She stressed that AI still leans heavily on human judgment and context, and that current pressure reflects expectations catching up with reality.
- Markus Levin, co‑founder of DePIN network XYO, warned against reading a market crash into these numbers. He highlighted that adoption remains far from saturated: by the end of 2025, about 84% of the world’s working‑age population reportedly hadn’t used generative AI tools, and only roughly 44.8 million people paid for AI subscriptions globally. Levin argued the disruption is concentrated and that over‑hiring and cost corrections, not immediate widespread automation, are driving the turbulence.
- Pavel Bezhin, CFO at Napoleon IT, likened the pattern to prior tech cycles (think dot‑com) where hype outpaced viable business models, but emphasized the outcome isn’t predetermined. Failures come from outdated business models, not the technology itself.
IPO timing and corporate controls
- Altman is said to be pushing for an IPO by year‑end. Friar has privately warned company leadership that OpenAI’s internal controls aren’t yet prepared for the reporting standards public markets demand — adding another complication to a potential listing.
Other fallout
- Last week, Altman apologized to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after OpenAI acknowledged it had banned a ChatGPT account tied to the suspect in a February mass shooting that killed eight people without notifying law enforcement.
What this means for crypto and markets
- For crypto-native investors, the story offers several takeaways: private market valuations and prediction markets are already pricing shifts in AI leadership; massive, long‑dated compute commitments create balance‑sheet and funding risk that could reverberate across venture and secondary private markets; and narratives around AI adoption vs. hype will continue to shape where capital moves next — including to tokenized infrastructure and DePIN projects that aim to sell distributed compute and data services as alternatives to centralized contracts.
Decrypt has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
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