OpenAI Fell Short of Its Own Targets as Compute Costs Piled Up: Report

OpenAI is facing a reckoning over the gap between its ambitions and its finances, experts said Declutterafter the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the company has missed key internal targets for ChatGPT users and revenue, while CFO Sarah Friar privately warned that rising computing costs could outpace the cash coming in.

Friar sounded the alarm after the company missed its goal of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of last year, a milestone it never reached and never announced, alarming some investors. WJ reported.

“When the dust settles, I think companies will discover something they already knew: Much of the work still depends on human judgment, collaboration, and contextual understanding that AI can’t yet replicate,” said Alice Li, Investment Partner at Foresight Ventures. Declutter.

Li sees the current pressure as an internal balance within the technology sector, and not as a leading indicator of a broader macroeconomic downturn.

OpenAI’s releases

OpenAI is locked approximately $600 billion in future data center spending, built up through years of aggressive dealmaking under Altman’s thesis that computer scarcity was the real barrier to AI growth.

Friar told other company executives she was concerned that revenue would not grow fast enough to cover those contracts, the report said.

Executives have reportedly started to look more closely at the data center deals and have wondered why Altman is still pursuing even more computing capacity despite the slowdown.

Anthropic has quietly overtaken OpenAI on stock trading platform Forge Global, where it now trades at about $1 trillion to OpenAI’s roughly $880 billion, according to Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques, the first time its rival has commanded a higher implied valuation.

Markus Levin, co-founder of DePIN network XYO, told us Declutter that reading a market crash into these numbers misinterprets the underlying data.

He noted that by the end of 2025, about 84% of the world’s working-age population had still not used generative AI tools, and only about 44.8 million people worldwide had a paid AI subscription.

“Conflating a slow, uneven adoption curve with an impending market reckoning reflects a tunnel vision that the data contradicts,” Levin said.

The disruption, he emphasized, is real but narrowly concentrated, driven more by overrent cycles in the tech sector and cost corrections than by automation sweeping through the broader economy.

“A rational repricing phase is almost inevitable; market sentiment tends to precede fundamentals, and expectations need to be recalibrated,” Li said.

She views current valuations as progressively priced rather than fundamentally broken, with fundamentals likely to catch up if capability development remains on track.

Declutter has contacted OpenAI for comment.

Pavel Bezhin, CFO at AI development company Napoleon IT, explains Declutter the pattern is known from previous technology cycles, and the outcome is not predetermined.

“In human history, such breakthroughs have indeed often preceded crises and recessions, but they have never been the direct cause of them,” he said.

Bezhin pointed to the dot-com crash as the relevant lesson: economic systems built on outdated models cannot adapt, and it is that failure, not the technology itself, that is causing the collapse.

“If global financial institutions have learned the right lessons from the dot-com crash, discussions about recession and system collapse will be nothing more than cautionary tales,” he added.

OpenAI’s IPO ambitions are caught in the middle of all this, with Altman pushing for a public listing by the end of the year, while Friar has privately warned that the company’s internal controls aren’t yet built for the reporting standards the public markets demand. On prediction market Myriad, owned by Declutter‘s parent company Dastan, users post a 64% chance about Anthropic conducting its IPO ahead of OpenAI.

Outside the boardroom, Altman spent last week apologizing to the community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after OpenAI acknowledged that it had banned a ChatGPT account linked to the suspect in a February mass shooting that left eight people dead without ever notifying law enforcement.