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OpenAI misses revenue targets as Anthropic and Google close in
Key Points
OpenAI missed internal revenue and user targets for the first quarter of 2026, with fast-growing competition from Google and Anthropic as a key factor.
Massive future spending commitments of around $600 billion for data centers are reportedly causing internal tensions between CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar.
Altman and Friar also disagree on the timing of a potential IPO. An ongoing lawsuit from Elon Musk and the medical leave of a top executive are adding further pressure ahead of any public offering.
OpenAI fell short of internal revenue goals for the first quarter of 2026. Meanwhile, pressure from competitors like Anthropic and Google is mounting, and tensions inside the company over massive spending commitments are growing.
OpenAI recently missed an internal revenue target for the first quarter of 2026, according to the Wall Street Journal. Before that, ChatGPT had already fallen short of user growth goals, The Information reported. An internal target of one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025 was also missed.
The main culprits appear to be the rapid growth of Google's Gemini chatbot and Anthropic's surging revenue - the company has nearly closed the gap with OpenAI despite being founded five years later. According to the WSJ, Anthropic has been taking market share from OpenAI particularly in coding and enterprise markets. Churn rates among ChatGPT subscribers are also raising concerns.
Slowing growth collides with massive spending commitments
The missed targets come at a particularly bad time. CEO Sam Altman locked OpenAI into roughly $600 billion in future data center spending through deals struck last year. The company expects to burn through $25 billion in cash in 2026 against a revenue target of $30 billion, following roughly $13 billion in revenue and $8 billion in losses the previous year.
CFO Sarah Friar has raised internal concerns about whether OpenAI can meet its future computing contracts if revenue doesn't grow fast enough, according to the WSJ. The board has also been questioning Altman's strategy of locking in ever more compute capacity. Altman and Friar dismissed reports of disagreements in a joint statement.
On the topic of going public, the two are reportedly not aligned either: Altman wants to accelerate an IPO, while Friar doesn't believe the company will be ready to handle the reporting requirements of a public company in 2026, according to The Information.
OpenAI recently raised $122 billion, the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history. According to the WSJ, that money could be spent within three years if the company hits its ambitious revenue targets, and parts of the funding are tied to specific conditions. On the bright side, the coding tool Codex is gaining traction, and the recently released GPT-5.5 leads several industry benchmarks.