OpenAI valuation under scrutiny

OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation is facing questions from some of its own investors as the company shifts its strategy toward business customers and coding tools. (reuters.com) The pressure comes two weeks after OpenAI said it had closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, with Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft among the backers. OpenAI said on March 31 that it is now generating $2 billion in revenue per month. (openai.com) Reuters reported on April 14, citing the Financial Times, that some backers think OpenAI has redrawn its product roadmap twice in six months as it responds first to Google and then to Anthropic. The report said some investors are asking what OpenAI is building and how that plan supports a price tag of $852 billion. (reuters.com) OpenAI has been moving its pitch beyond ChatGPT as a consumer app and toward artificial intelligence as business infrastructure. In an April 8 post, the company described “the next phase of enterprise AI” as a push to embed its models inside companies’ daily work. (openai.com) That shift lands in a more crowded market than the one OpenAI dominated after ChatGPT’s 2022 launch. Anthropic said on February 12 that it raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation and called itself “the market leader in enterprise AI and coding.” (anthropic.com) The argument over valuation is also tied to structure. OpenAI said in October 2025 that its for-profit arm became a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, while the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation kept control and held a 26% equity stake worth about $130 billion at the then-current valuation. (openai.com) That structure was designed to let OpenAI raise larger sums while keeping mission-focused governance in place. The company said the recapitalization followed nearly a year of discussions with the attorneys general of California and Delaware. (openai.com) Investors are weighing those governance changes against the scale of the business now being promised. OpenAI said it expects ChatGPT to reach 1 billion weekly active users soon, while CNBC reported in March 2025 that the company expected $12.7 billion in annual revenue that year. (openai.com, cnbc.com) OpenAI is disputing the idea that backers have lost confidence. A company spokesperson told Reuters the latest fundraise was “oversubscribed, completed in record time and backed by a broad set of leading global investors,” and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said the suggestion that investors do not support the strategy “defies the facts.” (reuters.com) The immediate test is whether OpenAI can show that its consumer scale, enterprise sales and coding products fit one plan before any initial public offering. The same investors who funded the $122 billion round are now asking for that case in sharper detail. (reuters.com, openai.com)