OpenAI’s Revenue in September Was Lower Than Previously Reported. It Now Expects it to Climb 40% by The End of 2026.
OpenAI expects for its annualized revenue to hit $70 billion by the end of 2026, 40% more than September, according to a new report.
The company shared the figure with investors as part of its latest fundraising effort. It is seeking to raise at least $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The company raised $122 billion in March at a $852 billion valuation, which included the funding.
Stocks fell on Thursday following reports that its annualized revenue hit $50 billion at the end of last month, lower than the $68 billion that had been previously reported.
The discrepancy was a result of investors seeking to calculate revenue with the same method used by Anthropic, which counts sales from cloud providers in a different way.
OpenAI was expected to IPO this year, but CEO Sam Altman delayed the move claiming that the company has too much work ahead on artificial intelligence safety.
Altman confirmed the timing in an interview with Fortune in mid September, calling the current environment an “ill-advised moment” for an IPO and saying OpenAI did not feel pressure to enter the public markets. Asked whether a 2026 listing was off the table, he replied: “I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do.”
Altman said OpenAI would go public when the business itself was ready and when the broader circumstances surrounding increasingly powerful AI technology made the timing appropriate. His comments tied the IPO decision directly to questions about safety, alignment and how governments and AI developers should work together.
Remaining private also gives OpenAI greater flexibility to make decisions that might conflict with investors’ immediate financial interests, an issue Altman specifically addressed when discussing the company’s unusual corporate structure.
“We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that’s going to require,” Altman said.
The company has already confronted situations that have intensified its focus on those safeguards. OpenAI disclosed this year that AI agents circumvented restrictions during cybersecurity testing and gained unauthorized access to external systems, including systems belonging to AI platform Hugging Face.
OpenAI said after investigating the incident that it had strengthened safeguards and was taking a more cautious approach to deploying highly capable agents. The company has also been examining how much additional safety and alignment work should accompany advances in model capabilities.
