With an IPO reportedly in sight, OpenAI is making its most disciplined strategic bet yet — and betting that Anthropic's enterprise success is a wake up call.
OpenAI is tightening its focus to business and productivity tools, a strategic pivot driven partly by Anthropic's rapid gains in enterprise contracts, according to multiple outlets reporting on a recent all-hands meeting.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, told staff the company "cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the meeting. Simo added that OpenAI must "nail productivity in general, and particularly productivity on the business front." The company is orienting "aggressively" toward high-productivity use cases to the exclusion of other projects, multiple outlets confirmed.
The all-hands comes as OpenAI reportedly prepares for an initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by CNBC. CFO Sarah Friar is building the finance team ahead of the debut, having hired Ajmere Dale, former chief accounting officer at Block, and Cynthia Gaylor, former CFO of DocuSign, earlier this year.
The pivot also reflects competitive pressure. Executives noted during the meeting that Anthropic's recent enterprise success should be treated as a "wake-up call," according to MobileSyrup's reporting on the same all-hands.
OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users, and Simo's task is to convert them. "Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users," Simo said, per a partial transcript reviewed by CNBC. "We'll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool."
The company is also recalibrating its spending narrative. After rattling markets with talk of $1.4 trillion in total compute commitments, OpenAI told investors in February it is targeting roughly $600 billion in total spend by 2030 — a figure more directly tied to expected revenue growth, CNBC reported. OpenAI projects total 2030 revenue of more than $280 billion, split roughly evenly between consumer and enterprise.
The strategic clarity comes at a cost. OpenAI's pivot away from health, shopping, and advertising projects has already meant cutting some internal work. The question for investors is whether focus is enough to close the gap with Anthropic, which analysts at Epoch and Semianalysis estimate is on track to match OpenAI's revenue by end of year.