OpenAI's President Expects the Company to Be Ready for an IPO in 2027 - and Admits That in AI Coding It "Wasn't Even in the Conversation"

Asked whether OpenAI will be ready to go public next year, the company's co-founder and president Greg Brockman answered briefly: "I think so. Yes." He said it on Wednesday at a Wall Street Journal tech conference. It sounds good for investors. What he said before and after is more interesting.

Brockman himself called the first and second quarters of 2026 "pretty tough". He also admitted that OpenAI "wasn't even in the conversation" when it came to AI agents that write code on their own, the field where rival Anthropic's Claude Code took a share of the market. "We had Codex, but nobody was talking about it," he said. "I think we just kept our heads down and did our work."

The turnaround, according to him, came in the third quarter. OpenAI's annualised revenue rate grew 70 percent over the previous quarter, and Brockman attributes that to the enterprise side of the business, which doubled. Today the majority of revenue comes from businesses, whereas before that side brought in only about 30 percent. As an example he mentioned the partnership with JPMorgan Chase.

Worth noting: these numbers come from the man running the company, on stage in front of a financial audience, with no prospectus and no audit. Growth of 70 percent - but from what? A percentage without an amount is the favourite language of every company preparing for a stock market listing.

"A year ago we weren't in the enterprise game at all. People saw us as a consumer company, and many businesses we started talking to asked: is OpenAI really committed to business?" Brockman said. He claims the consumer side hasn't shrunk but is growing too. But the story now being sold to investors is clear: the big money no longer comes from ordinary people chatting with ChatGPT, but from the companies paying for it.

It's also an admission of who was chasing whom this year. With businesses, Anthropic had already broken through, while OpenAI came second and is now boasting that it's catching up. When both giants have to answer to shareholders on the stock market, who will set the prices for tools that European businesses are already paying for?