OpenAI Called an IPO 'Ill-Advised' on Safety Grounds. Three Days Later It Was Fielding Offers at $1.2 Trillion and Asking for $1.5 Trillion, in Private
About This Episode
The New York Times reported on September 16 that OpenAI is considering a new private funding round at about $1.5 trillion, after investors approached it at $1.2 trillion, a figure the Financial Times and Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The talks come three days after Sam Altman told Fortune that going public now would be 'ill-advised' given everything happening with safety, and the same week Anthropic, whose CEO wrote the slowdown essay, prepares to market a $2 trillion IPO. The pause on the IPO is not a pause on the money: the round would keep the company private longer, let employees sell stock, and fund a compute bill that already dwarfs its $40 billion in annual revenue.
Our Take
The week the labs asked the world to slow AI down, the money sped up: OpenAI's safety-first IPO delay is also a $1.5 trillion private raise on the same growth clock, and the pause is being priced as a feature.
Continue Reading on Unscarcity
When AI Goes Public: Shareholders vs. Abundance
Altman says OpenAI must be able to make decisions 'not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders,' and his tool for that is staying private longer at $1.5 trillion; the article's answer to that gap is a corporate form with no obligation to extract, the Enterprise EXIT into a Mission Guild, because private investors run on the same growth clock as public ones.
OpenAI's $122B Round: The Biggest Bet in History
The March round's populist-moat lens (retail investors as a political constituency, the nonprofit-to-giant timeline) frames who is buying in now and who is left to buy at the IPO.