Some early investors in OpenAI are publicly questioning the start-up’s staggering $852 billion (£628 billion) valuation, amid a series of strategy shifts that many describe as unfocused, according to a report by the Financial Times. The criticism comes at a critical juncture for the artificial intelligence leader, which has rapidly evolved from a non-profit research lab into a commercial juggernaut backed by Microsoft and other major tech players.
Investors are particularly unhappy with OpenAI’s pivot toward higher-margin enterprise sales—a market segment where it trails far behind competitor Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI model. “You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100 per cent a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code? It’s a deeply unfocused company,” an unnamed early backer of OpenAI told the Financial Times. This sentiment is shared by several stakeholders who worry that chasing enterprise clients could dilute the company’s core strengths in consumer AI.
Valuation Concerns and Market Positioning
An investor who has backed both OpenAI and Anthropic said that any investment into OpenAI’s most recent funding round would have to assume an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more—a threshold that has become increasingly difficult to justify given the cheaper proposition of buying into Anthropic, which is currently valued at $380 billion. The valuation gap highlights a growing divide between the two AI leaders: OpenAI commands a premium due to its first-mover advantage with ChatGPT and its massive user base, but its recent strategic pivots have eroded confidence.
OpenAI’s valuation history is a rollercoaster. The company was founded in 2015 as a non-profit by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others, with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. In 2019, it transitioned to a “capped-profit” model, raising $1 billion from Microsoft. Subsequent funding rounds pushed its valuation to $29 billion in 2022, $80 billion in early 2024, and then $157 billion in October 2024. The current $852 billion figure appears in a secondary market transaction, underscoring the extreme optimism (and now, skepticism) surrounding the company.
Distractions and Strategic Missteps
The company’s recent moves have drawn sharp criticism from its own backers. One particularly contentious decision was the acquisition of tech talk show TBPN, which an investor described as “a distraction.” The deal, valued at an undisclosed amount, was meant to boost OpenAI’s media presence, but critics argue it diverts resources from core AI development.
More significantly, OpenAI has shuttered its video generation tool Sora, a project that once attracted a potential $1 billion investment from Disney. The closure of Sora eliminated that deal and signaled a retreat from the competitive video-generation market, where startups like Runway and Pika Labs are gaining traction. Additionally, the company scrapped plans for an “adult” chatbot, which had raised ethical concerns, and drastically pared back an investment deal with Nvidia—a move that could limit access to the GPUs essential for training large models.
Infrastructure plans have also been scaled back. OpenAI halted plans to develop a $30 billion data centre in the UK and paused expansion of a site in Abilene, Texas. These decisions suggest a tightening of capital expenditure, even as the company’s operating costs soar. The cost of training models like GPT-4 is estimated to exceed $100 million, and upcoming models could require billions.
Enterprise Pivot and Competition with Anthropic
Amid these cuts, OpenAI has doubled down on enterprise software, particularly its Codex coding tool, which helps developers write code. This puts it in direct competition with Anthropic’s Claude, which has gained a reputation for superior performance in enterprise tasks such as document analysis and secure code generation. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, has focused exclusively on safety and enterprise-grade reliability, earning trust from industries like finance and healthcare.
“OpenAI is trying to be everything to everyone, and that rarely works,” said Jai Das, president of investment firm Sapphire Ventures, who is not an investor in either company. He drew a parallel to the late 1990s browser wars, calling OpenAI “the Netscape of AI”—a reference to a market leader that was eventually eclipsed by Microsoft and acquired by AOL. The analogy underscores the risk that OpenAI could lose its dominance to better-focused competitors like Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind.
Infrastructure and Computing Edge
Despite the criticisms, OpenAI still holds a significant advantage in procuring computing resources. Its long-standing partnership with Microsoft provides access to massive cloud infrastructure, and the company has secured preferential pricing on Nvidia’s H100 and upcoming B200 GPUs. This infrastructure lead allows OpenAI to train and deploy models at a scale that rivals cannot easily match. For instance, ChatGPT’s 200 million weekly active users rely on inference infrastructure that is among the largest in the world.
Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar defended the company’s direction, stating that the large recent funding round—which raised $6.6 billion from investors including Thrive Capital, Tiger Global, and Microsoft—demonstrates strong confidence from the market. “Our investors see the long-term potential, and the capital will be used to advance our mission,” Friar said in a memo to employees. However, some analysts note that the funding round’s structure required investors to commit to revenue-sharing arrangements that could dilute returns in the future.
Broader Industry Context
The investor discontent comes at a time when the entire AI industry is under scrutiny. Competition is intensifying not only from Anthropic but also from Google, which recently launched Gemini, and from open-source models like Meta’s Llama. The race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) is driving unprecedented investment, but also raising questions about monetization and sustainability. OpenAI’s revenue is estimated at $3.4 billion annually, but operating costs including compute and personnel are significantly higher, leading to continued losses.
Some investors believe OpenAI should focus purely on its consumer chatbot, which remains the most popular AI product globally. ChatGPT’s user base continues to grow, with recent additions including voice conversations and image generation capabilities. Diverting attention to enterprise sales, which require different sales teams, compliance certifications, and custom integrations, may dilute the brand and slow down innovation in the consumer segment.
Leadership and Cultural Dynamics
OpenAI’s leadership has also been a source of controversy. In November 2023, CEO Sam Altman was briefly fired by the board, then reinstated after a massive employee revolt. The event exposed deep divisions between the commercial and safety-focused factions within the company. Since then, Altman has consolidated power, but the departure of key figures like chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and co-founder Greg Brockman has left gaps in technical leadership. The new strategy—favoring enterprise and code over broad consumer AI—may reflect Altman’s vision, but it risks alienating the research community that made OpenAI famous.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has remained stable, with its leadership—including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei—publicly committed to safety-first principles. This stability appeals to enterprise customers who need long-term support and predictability.
Future Outlook
As OpenAI navigates these choppy waters, its next moves will be watched carefully. The company has announced plans to release GPT-5, which could be a game-changer in multimodal reasoning. But unless OpenAI can articulate a coherent strategy that satisfies both investors and customers, the unfocused label may stick. The upcoming funding round—reportedly targeting $300 billion valuation in secondary markets—will test whether the company can maintain its premium despite growing doubts.
In the end, the story of OpenAI is a tale of incredible success and equally daunting challenges. It created a product that captured the world’s imagination, but now must prove it can scale without losing its way. As one investor summed up: “They have the lead, but they’re making all the wrong moves to keep it.”
Source: Silicon UK News