OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees during an all-hands meeting Wednesday that the artificial intelligence lab “will be a public company in 2027,” but could debut sooner if “our business continues to inflect,” according to two people familiar with her comments who asked not to be named.
“The IPO is not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise,” Friar said, according to the sources. “We raised $122 billion in March, and that gives us flexibility.”
OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but has not publicly said when it plans to list. Rival Anthropic has also filed confidentially and has begun early investor meetings, as CNBC previously reported.
Friar told staff not to worry if Anthropic reaches the public market first, noting that Anthropic could “pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September.” She added, “That’s OK, we are running our own race.”
Growth metrics
At the meeting, Friar showed slides indicating OpenAI’s revenue run rate is up 35% quarter to date, its enterprise revenue run rate is up 50% quarter to date, and its AI coding and work product has reached 20 million weekly active users.
OpenAI also told investors it generated $6.7 billion in revenue in the second quarter, up 18% from the first quarter, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday. Its annualized revenue run rate recently topped $40 billion, as CNBC previously reported.
Anthropic, by comparison, told investors that its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year earlier, and shared a preliminary second-quarter revenue figure of $11.5 billion.
Executive churn
Friar’s comments come amid a wave of executive departures that have raised concerns among some of OpenAI’s backers.
Last week, revenue chief Denise Dresser left after just eight months. Two days earlier, longtime executive Brad Lightcap said he was leaving the ChatGPT creator after eight years to “start something new.” In July, product chief Fidji Simo stepped down to focus on recovery from chronic illness.
Remaining leaders, including Friar, CEO Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman, are now tasked with projecting stability as investors worry about competition, adoption of lower-cost open-weight models, and volatility in SpaceX’s stock price in its first two months on the market.
Brockman downplayed the departures in a CNBC interview Monday, saying he doesn’t think the turnover is “actually that atypical.” He added that because OpenAI is “so much in the spotlight, every departure gets scrutinized in a way that it doesn’t otherwise.”
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/19/open-ai-ipo-timing-2027-friar.html
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