By Roman Aglaganov
OpenAI has lowered its sights for its next funding round, according to a report in the Financial Times late on 30 October, summarised by CoinDesk. The company is now said to be aiming for about $20 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion, rather than the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion it had been seeking. OpenAI had already postponed plans for a stock market listing until 2027.
Why now
The report points to two pressures. The first is the market. The Nasdaq 100 index has fallen about 10% in the three weeks since a record high on 6 October, including a 4.5% drop on Friday 30 October, amid what CoinDesk calls anxiety about the AI boom. Earlier in the week, Alphabet’s shares fell almost 10% in a day after Google said its AI Mode searches were earning less from ads than ordinary search.
The second is competition for investors’ money. Anthropic, which filed publicly for a share listing on 26 October, is reported to be planning to go public in November and to be aiming to raise as much as $100 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation. Investors who want exposure to AI developers will soon be able to buy shares in one on the open market.
What it means
OpenAI would still be raising $20 billion, so this is a trim, not a collapse. But it is a sign that the price of AI ambition is now being negotiated rather than simply accepted. The figures come from a single report and have not been confirmed by OpenAI; CoinDesk’s story did not include a comment from the company.
Disclosure: AI Pulse is written with AI tools, including Claude, which is made by Anthropic.
