OpenAI faces probe and revenue note
Separately, OpenAI is under a Florida attorney‑general probe over child‑safety and national‑security concerns, while filings and reporting this week show the company expects substantial ad revenue growth—an estimate that positions it as a platform business rather than just a model vendor. The regulatory scrutiny and commercial ambitions together signal that AI firms are moving into both political and mainstream economic crosshairs. (tekedia.com) (thehindu.com)
Florida’s attorney general has opened a civil probe into OpenAI while the company is also telling investors its ad business could jump to $2.5 billion in 2026 and $100 billion by 2030. Those are two very different spotlights at once: one from a state prosecutor, one from the ad market. (myfloridalegal.com) (thehindu.com) The Florida side is not a criminal charge. It is a consumer-protection style investigation run by the office that enforces the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, the state’s main law for going after unfair or misleading business conduct. (myfloridalegal.com) Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has been using that office to pressure online platforms over child-safety issues, including a March 18, 2026 investigation into Discord that demanded records on age checks, moderation, parental controls, and reporting of exploitative activity. OpenAI now appears to be entering that same lane of scrutiny. (myfloridalegal.com) That child-safety angle did not come out of nowhere. In 2023, Florida joined 53 other attorneys general in asking Congress to study how artificial intelligence could be used to exploit children, warning that state and federal debate was focusing more on national security and education than on abuse risks. (myfloridalegal.com 1) (myfloridalegal.com 2) At the same time, OpenAI is no longer being judged only as a seller of subscriptions and application programming interface access. The company began testing ads in ChatGPT on February 9, 2026 for some United States users on the Free and Go tiers, with OpenAI saying the ads would be clearly labeled and would not change answers. (openai.com) (axios.com) The early numbers were big enough to make investors pay attention fast. Reuters reported on March 26 that OpenAI’s United States ads pilot had already crossed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate within six weeks of launch. (finance.yahoo.com) (thehindu.com) Now the projections are much larger. Reuters, citing Axios, reported on April 9 that OpenAI expects $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026, then $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028, $53 billion in 2029, and $100 billion in 2030. (money.usnews.com) (thehindu.com) Those forecasts rest on a consumer-internet scale assumption, not a software-vendor scale assumption. Reuters said the investor presentation ties the ad ramp to OpenAI reaching 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030. (money.usnews.com) (reuters.com) That changes the kind of company regulators think they are looking at. A business that answers questions for hundreds of millions of people and sells ad space around those answers starts to look less like a back-end model lab and more like a search engine, a social platform, or both at once. (openai.com) (money.usnews.com) OpenAI is also trying to fund an unusually expensive expansion. On March 31, 2026, the company said it had closed a funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation, while CNBC reported in February that OpenAI had told investors it was targeting roughly $600 billion in compute spending by 2030. (openai.com) (cnbc.com) So the Florida probe and the ad forecast are connected even if they arrived in separate headlines. The more OpenAI behaves like mass media, retail, and search all folded into one chat box, the more it invites the same questions those industries have faced for years: what children can see, what users can trust, and how much influence one interface should have. (myfloridalegal.com) (openai.com) (money.usnews.com)
