OpenAI Seeks $30B as Trump Backs AI Safety Audits

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

Ed Ludlow (0:21)

This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. OpenAI aims to raise at least $30 billion from investors in a new round of funding after pushing back its plans for an IPO. Plus, President Trump supports using outside auditors to assess the safety of AI systems at the meeting with Silicon Valley leaders yesterday. And Apple keeps pushing the envelope under new CEO John Ternus and plans to make its foray into the smart home market. Good morning from Los Angeles. We'll get to why I'm here a little later in the show. Let's get straight to our top story in today's big number. $1.4 trillion.

That's the valuation OpenAI is seeking as it looks to raise at least $30 billion in a new funding round. All according to sources. The potential raise would give the chat GBT maker fresh capital after pushing back plans to go public. Bloomberg's AI editor, Seth Figerman joins us now. And Seth, you worked on this story with me yesterday. Let's be very clear. This is Bloomberg's reporting alongside in parallel with OpenAI having its Dev Day.

And it sounds very much based on our reporting, this is the investors pushing for this, right?

Seth Figerman (1:29)

Yeah, that's really the impression that we've gotten here. Now that said, I think OpenAI, at this point, there is no clear timetable for when this company might go public. And our understanding is it's looking potentially for a bridge round to kind of give it additional capital while it continues to push forward on these very cost intensive infrastructure initiatives and model development to give it the bandwidth to continue to build that that's really going public in the next few months.

Ed Ludlow (1:54)

We had two critical conversations yesterday, which we will play out later in the program. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer. And both of them address both the IPO timing. And in Sarah Fryer's case, they have a lot of capital on the balance sheet.

And she kind of responded to our reporting a little bit. It was your job to take that, put it in the story, kind of summarize it.

Seth Figerman (2:17)

Yeah, I think she said a couple of important things to you. The first is that this is a very well-capitalized business. They raised $122 billion in March, which exceeds pretty much any IPO that we've ever seen. At the same time, she suggested that there is market demand for possible funding around here. And certainly as this company looks to push ahead with new data centers and its own chips endeavor and other efforts to compete for top talent, there might always be an opportunity and a need to bolster its coffers, so to speak.

Ed Ludlow (2:46)

The headlines of yesterday morning before the Dev Day kicked off was, how is OpenAI's business doing? And there were ARR numbers. What do we learn about the health of OpenAI?

Seth Figerman (2:56)

Yeah, I certainly feel that the narrative in the last quarter has been that its business has been re-accelerating. I think for a lot of this year, there was a perception, probably more true than not, that the company was a bit on the back foot as Anthropic was more ascendant. But as the company has kind of narrowed its focus to AI coding and enterprise tools and started to really regain momentum with its in-house models, including Astra, it seems to be experiencing renewed consumer and business adoption, including again, on the consumer side, it felt like it took a long time to hit a billion users after slowing a bit, but now they're saying they've hit 1.2 just a couple months after announcing one. So it seems like on both sides, they're kind of starting to fire again on all cylinders. And that's a good story if they're going out and potentially raising more capital.

Ed Ludlow (3:38)

Bloomberg's AI editor, Seth Figerman, thank you very much. As billions more pour into AI tech leaders are making the case for opportunities that come with that investment while continuing to warn about the risks. Here's what they had to say after meeting with President Trump at the White House.

SPEAKER_4 (3:54)

Whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks. And, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work. We all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.