OpenAI under pressure

OpenAI is trying to look like the next big public company at the exact moment state regulators are asking whether its most famous product is safe enough for kids. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said on April 9 that his office had opened an investigation into ChatGPT over possible harms to minors. (reuters.com) That probe landed one day after OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC the company plans to reserve part of any initial public offering for retail investors, which means ordinary individual buyers instead of only big funds and banks. Friar said the company wants people who use its products to have a chance to own the stock when it lists. (cnbc.com) OpenAI has been moving toward Wall Street for weeks, not just talking about it. CNBC reported on March 17 that the company hired former DocuSign finance chief Cynthia Gaylor to oversee investor relations as OpenAI prepared for a possible stock-market debut by the end of 2026. (cnbc.com) The company also just closed an enormous private round before any public listing. On March 31, OpenAI said it had raised $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation, and CNBC reported that $3 billion of that came from individual investors through bank channels. (cnbc.com) At the same time, OpenAI is discovering that artificial intelligence needs old-fashioned industrial inputs like land, power lines, and permits. CNBC reported on April 9 that OpenAI paused its United Kingdom Stargate data-center project, which had been announced in September with Nvidia and Nscale, because of energy prices and regulatory concerns. (cnbc.com) Stargate is OpenAI’s giant computing buildout, and it was sold as a $500 billion infrastructure push with partners including Oracle and SoftBank. CNBC reported in March that the Abilene, Texas, site is the flagship campus, while OpenAI has also been rethinking where future capacity should go and which Nvidia chips those sites should use. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) That creates a strange split-screen for investors. One side of OpenAI is pitching itself as a consumer and enterprise company with enough brand power to let retail buyers into the initial public offering, while the other side is still wrestling with the utility-bill and permitting math of running giant model-training campuses. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) There is another layer under all of this, which is OpenAI’s corporate structure. OpenAI’s own 2023 governance post said the nonprofit governed the company and could override for-profit interests for safety reasons, but that same page now carries an October 28, 2025 update saying its structure information is outdated. (openai.com) By late 2025, OpenAI had completed a reorganization that split the nonprofit, now called the OpenAI Foundation, from the for-profit public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group. Time reported that the foundation received a $130 billion stake in the for-profit entity, while Microsoft held a separate $135 billion stake. (time.com) That is why this week’s three headlines fit together instead of colliding by accident. A company that wants retail investors, needs more power-hungry data centers, and is being investigated by a state attorney general will get judged not just on ChatGPT growth, but on whether its public-benefit promises, its nonprofit roots, and its public-company ambitions can all survive in the same legal shell. (reuters.com) (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2)