The company that introduced the world to ChatGPT, and triggered a global AI arms race, is now facing an uncomfortable question from the very investors who bankrolled its rise: is it actually worth $852 billion?
According to an exclusive report by the Financial Times, some of OpenAI's own backers are growing uneasy about the company's rapidly shifting strategy, even as CEO Sam Altman remains publicly bullish. The emerging concern is that OpenAI is trying to do too many things at once and risks losing ground on multiple fronts simultaneously.
As it scampered to do it all, Anthropic, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI researchers, seemed to have consistently gained the upper hand. According to FT, Anthropic's annualised revenue surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by March 2026, driven almost entirely by demand for its AI coding tools from businesses, the exact enterprise market that OpenAI is now scrambling to capture.
One of OpenAI's early backers told the FT that it is now a "deeply unfocused company."
In the report, OpenAI's leadership pushed back hard. Last month, Altman secured a $122 billion funding round, the largest private fundraising in Silicon Valley history, from over 25 blue-chip investors, including SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, FT noted. CFO Sarah Friar told the FT the raise was oversubscribed and completed in record time.
But flexibility costs money. The FT reports that plans for a $30 billion UK data centre have been ditched, an expansion of a Texas facility scrapped, and a $100 billion Nvidia deal substantially pared back. OpenAI shuttered its viral video tool Sora, causing Disney's planned $1 billion investment to evaporate. The company also spent "low hundreds of millions of dollars" acquiring a tech talk show called TBPN, a move that baffled investors, as per the report.
Reuters separately confirmed that OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an IPO potentially valuing the company at up to $1 trillion, possibly as early as this year. But according to FT, justifying the current round requires assuming an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more, a target that is getting harder to defend when Anthropic, valued at just $380 billion, is increasingly seen as the sharper bet.