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AI lab floated $1.4tn price tag earlier this month, according to documents seen by the FT

OpenAI has cut its valuation target for its latest funding round after facing resistance on a $1.4tn price tag from some investors, as it pushes to raise $30bn before going public next year.

The ChatGPT maker is in the final stages of a deal which is expected to value the company at $1.25tn, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

That would be a jump of almost 50 per cent from its current $852bn valuation, but is lower than the price pitched to investors earlier this month, according to people familiar with the matter.

The lower funding target comes as US tech stocks have sold off sharply, due to intensifying concerns about the sustainability of the debt-fuelled AI infrastructure boom.

Morgan Stanley and San Francisco-based tech fund Dragoneer had floated OpenAI to the bank’s private wealth clients at a pre-money valuation of $1.4tn, according to documents seen by the FT.

Multiple people with knowledge of the Morgan Stanley-led process said demand from clients was weaker than in the past. “There has been zero clamouring,” said one of the people. “All the prior times [OpenAI] have been on there’s been a frenzy. This time is a bit of a thud.”

Some investors were also suffering from fatigue, or “indigestion”, having invested heavily in prior rounds, said some of the people. OpenAI raised $40bn in March 2025 and a record-breaking $122bn in March this year. Arch-rival Anthropic has also raised close to $100bn this year.

Other investors told the FT they would rather wait and see how Anthropic prices in an initial public offering, expected later this year, before committing to its rival.

OpenAI is targeting raising $30bn as a “bridge” before its own public offering. That was likely to come in the first half of 2027, said a person close to the company, though no date has been fixed.

US investment group Coatue and funds from the United Arab Emirates were in discussion to lead the round, said one of the people with knowledge of the deal.

The deal also gives OpenAI right of first refusal on new computing power developed by its partners in the UAE, they added.

The company has given prospective investors until October 30 to commit to the deal, and may ultimately raise less than $30bn depending on investor interest.

OpenAI declined to comment. Coatue did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNBC on Thursday reported that OpenAI was nearing a deal at $1.25tn.

Jimmy Chang, chief investment officer at the Rockefeller Global Family Office, which has exposure to OpenAI and Anthropic, said uncertainty around both of the companies’ IPOs was weighing on the broader US stock market.

“The market needs to see a successful IPO,” said Chang. “These companies need funding.”

At first, the X headlines this morning about the latest AI-powered cybersecurity incident seemed dire. But by the time I had a cup of coffee and began parsing all the cyber jargon, I was reassured that an apparent solution was on its way to plug a major new security hole that could make websites vulnerable to cyberintrusions. Since August, a coalition led by OpenAI has been working to address critical vulnerabilities in PHP, an open-source programming language that undergirds the web. But there was bad news, too: This type of long-simmering response to the latest AI-discovered vulnerabilities may not be viable for much longer.

For months, OpenAI has been harping on what it calls the “defender’s window”—the critical period of time when cybersecurity experts, armed with advanced AI models, can identify and patch vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them first. The issue is that the gap is rapidly narrowing between cybercapable models from leading U.S. frontier labs and Chinese open-source models, which lack the restrictions U.S. labs impose on their models’ capabilities. Anthropic said as much in a blog post from late September warning that Chinese lab Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 model only lags the U.S. frontier models by about four months.

The good news: The Trump administration has a shiny new organization created for moments just like these. It’s called the Super Intelligence Force, a name that may elicit eyerolls from some of our more jaded readers. Still, I have heard over and over that all the AI industry wants is coordination and clarity from the White House. That, presumably, is what the SI Force will offer, led by heavy hitters including National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton and senior Defense Department official Emil Michael.

An OpenAI spokesperson told me today that they had briefed several agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, about the PHP vulnerability, as well as briefing Clayton and Michael late last week, representing the first “major engagement” between OpenAI and the SI Force. The spokesperson added that the SI Force provided a central point to coordinate their communication across the broader government. According to a White House official, the SI Force’s work involved helping to put pressure on the “relevant parties” to deploy a vulnerability patch.

While the SI Force’s coordination function may not seem terribly ambitious, at least it’s a start. It’s worth remembering that the White House essentially had to reorient its entire AI policy in April with the announcement of Mythos. The arrival of Chinese cybercapable open models could represent a Mythos 2.0 moment. I spoke with one former White House official who told me solutions from even a few months ago, like the July Gold Eagle clearinghouse that allows organizations and government agencies to share and fix software vulnerabilities, might already be outdated. It’s up to the SI Force to create a path forward. The next major internet bug likely won’t have the luxury of a two-month-long defender’s window.

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