OpenAI Missed Its User and Revenue Targets — Is the Company Falling Behind in the AI Race?
OpenAI was already navigating a rough patch thanks to the lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against the company. But now a new problem has surfaced, and this time it comes from within.
A report published by the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, revealed that the company failed to hit its own internal user and revenue targets, casting a very different light on the future of a company that, until recently, seemed untouchable in the artificial intelligence market. 🤔
And we are not talking about some minor target here.
OpenAI had internally committed to reaching 1 billion weekly active users on ChatGPT by the end of 2025 — a number that was never publicly announced and is still far from being reached. To make matters worse, the company reportedly saw some of its users migrating to rivals.
Meanwhile, competitors like Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude are pushing forward aggressively, especially in the enterprise segment, which is exactly where the big money is.
So the burning question is: is OpenAI losing ground in the race for AI leadership?
Let’s break down what is actually going on. 👇
The Numbers OpenAI Would Rather Keep Under Wraps
According to the Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI set ambitious targets for 2025 that simply were not met. The company expected to close the year with a massive base of weekly active users, somewhere around 1 billion people using ChatGPT every week. For context, ChatGPT currently has around 400 million weekly users, according to public data from the company itself. That is already impressive, but it falls well short of what was promised internally. This gap represents an enormous disconnect between the narrative the company projects to the market and the reality behind the scenes.
On the revenue side, the picture is also uncomfortable. OpenAI reportedly projected revenue figures that did not materialize within the expected timeframe, which is an important signal for anyone following the sector closely. This does not mean the company is broke — far from it. ChatGPT Plus, enterprise plans, and developer APIs continue generating considerable revenue. But when a company of the size and visibility of OpenAI misses its own internal projections, it inevitably raises questions about the pace of growth and the ability to sustain the trajectory that was promised to investors and strategic partners.
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And in an environment where money is flowing heavily into the artificial intelligence sector, any stumble draws attention.
Internal Concerns About Costs and Infrastructure
The report brought up a detail that caught a lot of attention: Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, reportedly expressed concern to other executives about the company’s ability to honor future computing contracts at the current pace of business. In other words, if revenue does not grow as expected, it becomes difficult to fund the massive infrastructure that cutting-edge AI models require.
On top of that, board members reportedly began to reexamine OpenAI’s data center plans. Sam Altman had embraced enormous ambitions to expand the company’s computing capacity, but reality knocked on the door: the company already had to scale back some of its plans to build proprietary data center clusters, facing pushback from potential lenders.
Both Altman and Friar told the Wall Street Journal that any suggestion the company would cut back on computing investments was ridiculous. But the mere existence of these internal discussions is, in itself, a sign that things are not going quite as smoothly as the company’s public narrative suggests. 😬
The Relationship With Microsoft Is Also Shifting
To make the picture even more complex, OpenAI is restructuring its relationship with Microsoft, which has historically been its biggest supporter and investor. The two companies recently announced that OpenAI would have the freedom to offer its models on other cloud providers, no longer restricted to the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
In return, however, an important revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies will be reduced. OpenAI claims this gives it more business flexibility, but not everyone is convinced.
Martin Peers from The Information questioned this premise, pointing out that it is not clear whether customers on Amazon’s AWS, for example, would be willing to switch from Claude — which already runs natively on the platform — to OpenAI models. In other words, the newfound freedom may not automatically translate into real revenue growth, at least not in the short term.
This renegotiation is a risky bet. Microsoft remains a crucial distribution channel for OpenAI, with Copilot reaching hundreds of millions of Windows computers and the Office suite. Shaking up this dynamic while the internal numbers are not hitting their marks is a move that requires a lot of confidence — or necessity. 📊
The Competition Is Not Waiting Around
While OpenAI deals with its internal challenges, the rest of the artificial intelligence market is advancing at a rapid pace. Google, with Gemini, has a massive structural advantage: native integration with Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meet, and the entire suite of products that billions of people already use every day. This means Gemini does not need to convince users to adopt a new tool — it simply shows up where the user already is. That distribution strategy is extremely powerful and represents a real challenge for ChatGPT, which still relies heavily on organic acquisition and one-off partnerships to grow its user base.
Anthropic, for its part, has been betting heavily on the enterprise segment with Claude, and the results have been turning heads. Tech companies, consulting firms, and law offices are adopting Claude as an internal tool, drawn primarily by the model’s reputation for safety, alignment, and quality responses on complex tasks. The Wall Street Journal report confirms this trend, noting that OpenAI has seen users migrating to competitors.
The B2B segment is precisely where average deal sizes are higher and where customer loyalty tends to be stronger, making Anthropic’s moves especially strategic in the long game. OpenAI indirectly acknowledged this challenge by doubling down on efforts to make its Codex, an AI-powered coding tool, more competitive against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Beyond that, players like Meta with Llama, and smaller companies with open-source models, are fragmenting the market even further. The notion that OpenAI was the only viable option for anyone wanting to implement quality artificial intelligence is long gone. Today, a developer or a company has a real range of choices, with models that run locally, at no API cost, and with competitive performance across various task categories. This puts pressure on margins and complicates the growth equation that OpenAI needs to solve. 📉
The IPO Question Looms Large
Another critical piece of this story is the IPO. Some OpenAI executives want to take the company public by the end of the year. With user and revenue targets not being met, that ambition naturally becomes harder to pull off.
The market has already reacted. Shares of companies tied to OpenAI, such as SoftBank and Oracle, dropped after the Wall Street Journal report was published, according to Bloomberg. When the financial market starts pricing in concerns about a company before it even goes public, that is a sign that trust needs to be rebuilt quickly.
For a successful IPO, investors need to believe in the company’s sustainable growth trajectory. Revealing that internal targets were missed right during the period leading up to a potential public offering is, at the very least, a significant complication. OpenAI will need to show over the coming quarters that it can reverse this trend if it wants to keep its listing timeline on track. 💰
OpenAI Still Has Cards to Play
Despite all of this challenging landscape, it is important to recognize that the company is not standing still. The week before the report was published, OpenAI launched a new AI model that, according to the company, surpasses important benchmarks across several categories. This is a relevant move because, at the end of the day, model quality is still the main competitive differentiator in this market.
The company has also been investing in expanding the ChatGPT ecosystem with new features, including web browsing, integrated image generation with DALL-E, file analysis, and long-term memory — capabilities that make the tool more useful for everyday tasks. Each of these additions increases the product’s so-called stickiness, meaning the tendency for users to stay on the platform because they find more value in it over time.
The Microsoft partnership, even after being renegotiated, remains an important distribution channel. Copilot integrated into Windows and Office reaches hundreds of millions of machines around the world, and that reach could be the primary driver of user base growth over the coming months, provided the integration is executed well.
What This Means for OpenAI’s Future
Let’s be clear: missing an internal target is not the same as being in crisis. Every company sets aggressive goals precisely to push itself, and the fact that OpenAI has reached 400 million weekly users is, on its own, an unprecedented achievement in the history of consumer technology. No digital product has grown as fast as ChatGPT in its early years, and that still counts for a lot when evaluating the company’s health.
The real issue is not the absolute number, but the gap between what was promised internally and what was delivered, especially at a time when the company needs credibility to close investment rounds, win long-term enterprise contracts, and eventually go public.
The broader context does not help either. OpenAI is in the middle of a corporate restructuring process, attempting to convert its nonprofit structure into an actual for-profit company — something essential to keep attracting the billions of dollars that developing cutting-edge AI models demands. Between regulatory investigations, the lawsuit with Elon Musk, the Microsoft renegotiation, and now the revelation of missed targets, the pressure on the company’s leadership, especially on Sam Altman, is very real.
Turning Point or Just a Stumble?
The truth is it is still too early to make any definitive call about the future of OpenAI. The company remains the most recognizable name in artificial intelligence for the general public, it has capital, it has talent, and it has a user base that very few tech companies have ever managed to build so quickly.
What the Wall Street Journal report does, in practice, is take some of the shine off the invincibility narrative that surrounded the company, showing that, like any business, OpenAI also makes mistakes, underestimates challenges, and needs to adjust to market realities.
But perhaps the biggest challenge for OpenAI right now is one of perception. The market, investors, and the tech press have started looking at the company’s narratives with more skepticism, and that is not something you fix with just a new model or a product update. Trust is rebuilt through consistency, through delivering on what was promised, and through transparency about the real challenges ahead.
The artificial intelligence sector is mature enough to understand that a rough patch does not define an entire trajectory. But it is also demanding enough to hold anyone who positions themselves as a leader accountable for real results. OpenAI has the resources to turn this around, but it will need to deliver more than shiny promises.
The market wants to see the numbers hit. 🎯
