This is the second post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The first post covered Anthropic; subsequent posts will cover Google DeepMind, Meta, and the Chinese open-weight frontier on the same template. Each lab gets a structured ledger to come back to and check against what actually happened.

Where OpenAI stands as of mid-May 2026, for context:

  • Annualized revenue is roughly $25B, growing at about $2B/month. The historical trajectory: ~$2B in 2023, ~$6B in 2024, ~$20B at end of 2025, ~$25B by February 2026.
  • Anthropic surpassed OpenAI on ARR in April 2026 (~$30B vs. OpenAI’s ~$25B). This is the first time OpenAI has trailed a competitor on revenue since ChatGPT launched.
  • Closed a $122B funding round at an $852B post-money valuation in March 2026 (Amazon $50B, Nvidia $30B, SoftBank $30B, with continued Microsoft participation).
  • ChatGPT has ~900M weekly active users, 9M+ paying business users, 7M+ enterprise seats, and is deployed at 92% of the Fortune 500.
  • Microsoft partnership was restructured on April 27, 2026: exclusive Azure license ended, OpenAI can serve on any cloud, the AGI escape clause was deleted entirely, revenue-share payments are now capped at $38B cumulative through 2030.
  • Stargate compute program: ~7GW of capacity planned across six U.S. sites plus the UAE; over $400B committed over three years. Abilene is at 2 of 8 buildings operational.
  • Model lineup: GPT-5, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5 (April 23), GPT-5.5 Instant (May 5), o3, o4-mini. GPT-5.6 began internal testing April 30. GPT-6 has not shipped — what was code-named “Spud” was released as GPT-5.5.
  • DeployCo (the OpenAI Deployment Company) launched May 11 with $4B from TPG, Goldman Sachs, and SoftBank. Anchored by the Tomoro acquisition (~150 Forward Deployed Engineers, partnered since 2023). Explicitly modeled on Palantir’s FDE playbook.
  • DoD relationship: $200M contract with the Department of War signed Feb 27, 2026; OpenAI is one of eight firms cleared to deploy on classified networks.
  • Hardware: Jony Ive’s io device delayed from 2026 to early 2027; expected as a screenless, contextually-aware device; 40–50M unit year-one target with Foxconn.
  • Sora video product: discontinued April 26, 2026; full API shutdown scheduled for September 24, 2026.
  • DevDay 2026 is scheduled for September 29 in San Francisco — the cadence anchor for this year’s major product announcements.
  • Sam Altman testified in the Musk lawsuit on May 12, 2026; verdict expected in coming weeks.

The predictions below are anchored on that baseline. Each has a target time window and a confidence level reflecting how willing I am to be wrong publicly about it. The 2026 predictions are organized around known event cadence (DevDay, Stargate ramp, IPO timing). The 2027 and 2028 predictions compress to quarter and year resolution as uncertainty widens.

2026 (Balance of Year)

Models

  • GPT-5.6 limited preview to Plus / Pro / API Enterprise tiers (Jun 2026, high)
  • GPT-5.6 general availability at DevDay (Sep 29, 2026, high)
  • GPT-5.7 ships as an agent-and-tool-use upgrade (Q4 2026, medium)
  • GPT-6 named and teased at DevDay; not GA in 2026 (Sep 2026, medium)
  • Voice mode 2 with realtime translation as default; built on the GPT-Realtime-Translate API primitives (Q3 2026, high)
  • A small-model line targeting the Jony Ive hardware seeds to developers (Q4 2026, low)

Business & Finance

  • Annualized revenue run-rate reaches $50B by year-end (Dec 2026, medium)
  • Annual revenue for 2026 (cumulative) lands around $30–35B (Dec 2026, high)
  • 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th acquisitions of 2026 close — the ~6-week cadence holds (Dec 2026, high)
  • S-1 filed with the SEC late November, hitting CFO Friar’s “H2 2026 regulatory filing” target (Nov 2026, medium)
  • IPO roadshow begins mid-December; pricing range disclosed at $1.0–1.4T (Dec 2026, medium)
  • IPO listing slips to Q1 2027 — Friar previously signaled exactly this (Dec 2026, medium)

DeployCo & Verticals

  • DeployCo announces 5+ marquee customer wins by year-end (banks, pharma, defense primes); reaches $1B+ ARR run-rate (Dec 2026, medium)
  • OpenAI for Finance launches at or just after DevDay, anchored on the Hiro acquisition (Q4 2026, medium)
  • OpenAI for Government formalized with named cabinet pilots (Q3 2026, high)
  • Healthcare adds 5–10 new health-system deployments (2026, medium)
  • The expected “third vertical” announcement at DevDay reframes — instead of a new productized vertical, OpenAI uses the slot to position DeployCo as the scalable vehicle for the long tail (Sep 2026, medium)
  • A vertical-specific subsidiary structure begins forming for Healthcare or Finance, mirroring the DeployCo template (Q4 2026, low)

Distribution & Multi-cloud

  • ChatGPT Business and the OpenAI API listed on AWS Marketplace (Q3 2026, high)
  • ChatGPT Business and the OpenAI API listed on GCP Marketplace (Q4 2026, medium)
  • First public confirmation that a major Microsoft 365 Copilot surface (Word, Excel, or Teams) is running on a non-OpenAI model (Q4 2026, medium)

Hardware

  • Jony Ive io device confirmed for February 2027 launch on the DevDay stage (Sep 2026, high)
  • A second hardware product line (wearable or earpiece) teased on stage (Sep 2026, low)
  • Foxconn U.S. factory site named (Q4 2026, medium)

Consumer

  • ChatGPT crosses 1.2B weekly active users (end of 2026, high)
  • Atlas browser crosses 80M daily active users; Chrome market-share decline becomes a measurable story (end of 2026, medium)
  • Atlas + ChatGPT desktop + Codex unified superapp ships at DevDay (March 2026 announcement lands) (Sep 2026, high)
  • A consumer subscription tier between Plus ($20) and Pro ($200) launches at $50–60/month (Q3 2026, medium)
  • 15M+ paying business users (up from 9M in February) (end of 2026, high)

Codex / Developer

  • Codex weekly active users cross 7M (Q3 2026, high)
  • Agent platform v2 launches at DevDay; third-party agent marketplace opens (Sep 2026, high)
  • API token volume passes 50B tokens/minute (end of 2026, medium)
  • Codex Security expanded into a full DevSecOps product line (Q4 2026, medium)

Infrastructure

  • Stargate Abilene reaches 6 of 8 buildings operational by August, 8 of 8 by year-end (2026, high)
  • Stargate Norway operational (Q4 2026, high)
  • Two additional sovereign-compute deals close (likely India, Japan, or Saudi Arabia) (end of 2026, medium)
  • First Titan custom silicon tape-out from TSMC, with Broadcom as design partner (Q4 2026, low)

Geopolitics & Governance

  • Musk lawsuit verdict delivered; cautious read is a split decision with appeals filed regardless of outcome (Jun–Jul 2026, high)
  • Pentagon contract first-deliverable milestones disclosed (Q3 2026, medium)
  • A senior White House liaison hire is announced (2026, medium)
  • Trusted Contact safety feature rolled to broad availability (Q3 2026, high)
  • GPT-5.5-Cyber preview extends beyond the EU to UK and additional Five Eyes partners (Q3 2026, medium)

2027

Models

  • GPT-6 family ships in full at DevDay 2027 (Sep 2027, high)
  • GPT-6 capability framing: long-horizon agents executing multi-day autonomous tasks unsupervised (2027, medium)
  • Sora successor (video model v2) launches at a quality level that meaningfully threatens commercial b-roll and explainer-video workflows (Q4 2027, medium)
  • A reasoning model with persistent memory and 50M+ token context becomes default (2027, medium)
  • A small-model line ships with strong on-device capability targeting the Jony Ive hardware (H1 2027, medium)

Business & Finance

  • IPO closes Q1 2027 at $1.3–1.6T; first-day move puts it briefly above $2T (Q1 2027, medium)
  • Year-end ARR reaches $110–130B (Dec 2027, medium)
  • Market cap reaches $2.5–3T by end of 2027; OpenAI is the largest U.S. company by market cap for at least one quarter (end of 2027, medium)
  • DeployCo grows to $5–10B ARR run-rate (end of 2027, medium)
  • A second subsidiary spin (most defensibly hardware) takes outside capital from a TPG / Goldman / SoftBank–style consortium (2027, medium)
  • Microsoft 20% revenue-share cumulative payments cross $20B of the $38B cap (end of 2027, high)
  • Total 2027 acquisitions: 7–8 (cadence slows post-IPO from ~6 weeks to ~8–10 weeks under public-company governance) (2027, medium)

Distribution

  • Non-Azure inference workloads (AWS + GCP combined) reach 30–50% of total OpenAI API revenue (end of 2027, medium)
  • Microsoft ships at least one major Copilot surface on a non-OpenAI model — awkward fact at OpenAI’s Q2 2027 earnings (mid-2027, medium)

Hardware

  • Jony Ive io device ships February 2027 (Q1 2027, high)
  • Year-one sales 5–10M units — well above the cautious “Apple Watch ramp” comparable, on the strength of ChatGPT’s installed base (2027, medium)
  • Second hardware product (wearable or earpiece) teased at DevDay 2027 with a Q2 2028 ship date (Q3 2027, medium)
  • Hardware revenue reaches $10–20B annualized (end of 2027, medium)

DeployCo & Verticals

  • 8+ productized verticals exist by year-end (2027, medium)
  • ChatGPT for Healthcare reaches >$5B ARR (2027, medium)
  • ChatGPT for Finance reaches >$3B ARR (2027, medium)
  • DeployCo IPO file or strategic-sale rumor begins circulating (end of 2027, medium)
  • An OpenAI Solutions Partner ecosystem (system integrators, vertical specialists) grows into a $10B+ sub-economy (end of 2027, low)

Workforce

  • Junior/mid software engineering employment contracts 30–40% from 2024 peak (mirroring the broader industry pattern) (2027, high)
  • McKinsey, Bain, and BCG analyst class sizes cut 20–40% YoY (2027, medium)
  • BLS publishes first major data series on AI-driven employment shifts (H2 2027, medium)
  • OpenAI launches a $2–3B retraining initiative tied to enterprise deployments (2027, medium)

Consumer

  • ChatGPT crosses 2B weekly active users (end of 2027, medium)
  • Atlas becomes the second-most-used browser globally (end of 2027, low)

Infrastructure

  • Stargate operational capacity passes 8GW (end of 2027, medium)
  • Titan-1 custom silicon enters production deployment for inference workloads (H2 2027, medium)
  • First nuclear partnership announced as direct supply (Oklo or X-energy, both Altman-connected) (2027, medium)
  • First Anthropic / OpenAI compute-sharing arrangement during peak demand events (2027, low)

Geopolitics & Governance

  • Musk lawsuit reaches final resolution — no removal, but reforms imposed on board composition (H1 2027, medium)
  • A “two-vendor” Pentagon AI doctrine emerges (OpenAI plus one other) (2027, medium)
  • Sam Altman testifies before Congress 3+ times across 2027 (2027, high)
  • A serious safety incident (autonomous agent causing material real-world harm) triggers congressional hearings (H2 2027, medium)
  • An OpenAI EU subsidiary structure is announced to address regulatory framework (2027, medium)

2028

Models

  • GPT-7 family ships (H1 2028, medium)
  • GPT-8 announcement (end of 2028, low)
  • Long-horizon agent capability (multi-week autonomous task completion) becomes a deployed product feature (H2 2028, medium)
  • Open-weight competitive frontier closes to within 6–12 months of OpenAI’s proprietary frontier (2028, medium)

Business & Finance

  • Year-end ARR reaches $200–250B (Dec 2028, medium)
  • Market cap reaches $3–4T (end of 2028, low)
  • Microsoft $38B revenue-share cap is hit in late 2028; revenue-share payments end (end of 2028, medium)
  • Microsoft IP license obligations continue through 2032 (per restructuring terms) (2028, high)
  • DeployCo IPO closes — $50–100B valuation, OpenAI retains majority (2028, medium)
  • A second subsidiary IPO (hardware or Healthcare) is filed (end of 2028, low)
  • Holding-company structure has 4–6 majority-owned operating subsidiaries — the org chart looks like a venture portfolio with the parent at the center (end of 2028, medium)
  • An OpenAI public-company acquisition is announced for $20–50B+; defensible candidates include Shopify, Stripe (if public), or a security/identity company (2028, low)

Hardware

  • io device line crosses 25–40M cumulative units shipped (end of 2028, medium)
  • Second hardware product ships in Q2 2028; year-one sales 5–10M units (2028, medium)
  • A third hardware category teased (laptop replacement, AR glasses, or successor form factor) (end of 2028, low)
  • Total hardware revenue reaches $30–60B annualized (end of 2028, low)

Workforce & the OpenAI Mafia

  • Junior/mid software engineering employment contracts 50–60% from 2024 peak (2028, medium)
  • BLS reports the first measurable decline in white-collar employment categories specifically attributable to LLM agent adoption (2028, medium)
  • IPO lockup expiry mints 2,000–3,000 millionaire employees and ~50 nine-figure employees (mid-2028, high)
  • 15–25 well-funded “OpenAI alumni” startups raise Series A or higher across 2028 (2028, high)
  • 3+ alumni companies raise at $1B+ valuations within 12 months of founding (2028, medium)
  • OpenAI’s own retention numbers become a quoted concern in earnings calls (2028, medium)
  • A unified Western framework for AI-driven workforce displacement compensation begins to take shape (2028, low)

Consumer

  • ChatGPT crosses 3B weekly active users (~35% of internet-connected adults) (end of 2028, low)
  • Atlas becomes the default browser on new device sales in the U.S. (end of 2028, low)

Infrastructure

  • Stargate operational capacity passes 15GW (end of 2028, medium)
  • Custom silicon (Titan-2) handles >50% of inference workload (end of 2028, medium)
  • OpenAI buys or co-builds nuclear capacity through a small modular reactor partnership (2028, medium)
  • Multi-gigawatt single-customer power purchase agreements become routine (2028, medium)
  • A formal civilian-DoD compute reserve agreement exists (2028, low)

Geopolitics & Governance

  • First federal U.S. AI law passes; OpenAI policy team is among the primary drafters and the bill’s compliance burden entrenches incumbents (2028, medium)
  • Sam Altman openly courted for cabinet or commission roles; chairs (or is offered the chair of) an executive-branch AI advisory commission (2028, medium)
  • USG bans Chinese-trained inference services for federal and critical-infrastructure customers (2028, medium)
  • A major Chinese open-weight model reaches parity with the prior-generation OpenAI frontier (H2 2027 or 2028, medium)
  • Reciprocal Chinese restrictions cut OpenAI’s already-near-zero China revenue to formally zero (2028, high)
  • The global AI market bifurcates: U.S. plus allied bloc on one side, Chinese plus non-aligned bloc on the other (end of 2028, medium)
  • OpenAI is recognized as a quasi-sovereign actor in trade agreements (2028, low)

Science

  • An OpenAI-trained model contributes meaningfully to a major scientific discovery (medical, materials, or physics) (2028, low)

What Would Break the Trajectory

These predictions hold only if the next two and a half years don’t contain a discontinuity. Ranked by probability:

  1. A serious safety incident with OpenAI technology — most likely candidates are an autonomous agent causing material financial loss, or a healthcare-context death attributable to an agent.
  2. The Musk lawsuit produces a worse outcome than expected (forced restructuring, Altman removal, or major equity-share changes).
  3. A federal regulatory hammer that lands harder than the incumbent-friendly framing assumed above — most likely from the SEC if pre-IPO disclosures prove problematic, or from a unified post-incident AI Act.
  4. A capability plateau — GPT-6 or GPT-7 fails to deliver the step-change improvements that the cadence implicitly promises.
  5. A compute supply collapse — Taiwan/TSMC, U.S. energy infrastructure, or Stargate financing.
  6. The Microsoft separation goes worse than orchestrated — a downstream contract dispute or a Copilot defection that costs OpenAI a meaningful customer or distribution channel.
  7. U.S./China conflict at sufficient intensity to disrupt Pacific operations or chip supply.
  8. Internal stress — board conflict, additional executive departures, or a governance crisis that undoes the post-2023 stabilization.

The honest sentence: absent a discontinuity, OpenAI continues to be one of the two or three most consequential companies on earth. The interesting question is no longer “is OpenAI big enough to matter” — it’s “what does the OpenAI holding-company structure look like, and how does that reshape both the AI industry and the global enterprise software market.”

What’s Different About OpenAI

Four observations that distinguish OpenAI’s trajectory from Anthropic’s or Google DeepMind’s, and which I think the rest of this series will return to:

  1. OpenAI is no longer the revenue leader. Anthropic passed it in April 2026, with substantially better unit economics (4x less spend per training run, by some estimates). This is the first time OpenAI has been second on revenue in any meaningful way since ChatGPT launched, and the company’s strategy now appears to be partially defined by competition with a smaller, more efficient rival rather than by its own pure growth curve.

  2. OpenAI has a hardware play in a way Anthropic does not. The Jony Ive device is, on inspection, a multi-billion-dollar bet that the form factor of consumer AI will be a dedicated piece of hardware rather than an app on a phone. If it works, OpenAI becomes a hardware company at a scale that no AI lab has previously attempted. If it doesn’t, the bet is one of the most expensive single product failures in the technology industry’s history.

  3. OpenAI is structuring itself as a holding company. This is the structural thread that the May 11 DeployCo announcement made unmistakable. DeployCo took $4B of outside capital (TPG, Goldman, SoftBank) into a subsidiary, not the parent — and the staffing came from Tomoro, a partner company that had been quietly accumulating Forward Deployed Engineers since 2023 specifically for this purpose. Three years of preparation for a subsidiary spin is not a tactic, it is an architecture. Expect 4–6 majority-owned operating subsidiaries on the org chart by end of 2028, financed similarly. Anthropic’s structure (PBC with Trust governance) and Google DeepMind’s structure (research arm under a hyperscaler) do not have anything analogous.

  4. OpenAI’s governance is contested in a way Anthropic’s is not. The Musk lawsuit, the Microsoft restructuring, the board composition changes, the PBC transition — all of these are still in active legal and structural motion. The corporate form is not settled. The April 27 Microsoft deal removed the AGI escape clause entirely, which changes the constraint shape for the next two years: the Microsoft relationship now winds down via the $38B revenue-share cap (predictably, mathematically) rather than via a contentious capability declaration. That is a less dramatic and more predictable transition than the cautious frame would have called for, but it pushes the dissolution of the Microsoft dependency forward by 12–18 months relative to the original 2030 schedule.

What’s Next

The next post in this series covers Meta — the open-weight Llama strategy, the Reality Labs convergence with FAIR, the Connect conference cadence in September, and the EU regulatory headwinds. After that: the Chinese frontier (DeepSeek, Zhipu, Moonshot, Qwen, and the SOE consolidation question), which is the post that most directly tests the bifurcation thesis above.

Sources for the baseline data in this post: OpenAI launches the Deployment Company (OpenAI), DeployCo $4B financing and Tomoro acquisition (Let’s Data Science), Microsoft-OpenAI restructuring (CNBC), $38B revenue-share cap (AI Magazine), AGI clause removed (Spyglass), Anthropic just passed OpenAI in revenue (SaaStr), OpenAI raises $122 billion (OpenAI), OpenAI valued at $852B (Bloomberg), ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (TechCrunch), Stargate advances with Oracle partnership (OpenAI), Five new Stargate sites (OpenAI), Stargate Norway (OpenAI), Introducing GPT-5.5 (OpenAI), GPT-5.5 Instant (TechCrunch), Our agreement with the Department of War (OpenAI), Jony Ive smart speaker delayed to 2027 (MacRumors), OpenAI IPO targets late 2026 (crypto.news), Introducing ChatGPT Atlas (OpenAI), OpenAI desktop superapp merger (The Tech Portal), DeployCo Palantir playbook (The Decoder), OpenAI for Healthcare (Fortune), Altman takes stand in Musk lawsuit (CNN Business), Announcing OpenAI DevDay 2026.