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The A.I. company faced pushback after a top executive raised the idea of government aid, amid concerns that the A.I. industry is headed toward a dangerous bubble.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer.Credit...Mike Segar/Reuters

Nov. 6, 2025, 4:16 p.m. ET

OpenAI’s top executives raced to contain growing alarm over the artificial intelligence company’s financial situation on Thursday after its chief financial officer suggested that the U.S. government could “backstop” the firm’s funding deals.

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, faced widespread online pushback after she raised the prospect of government aid for the company at a Wall Street Journal technology conference on Wednesday. OpenAI has embarked on a deal spree to build computing infrastructure to power A.I. development, and Ms. Friar said the company wanted to find creative ways to finance its ambitious — and expensive — plans.

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” Ms. Friar said at the conference in Napa, Calif., adding that it would be “the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen.”

Her comments set off concern amid rising unease over whether an industrywide A.I. spending frenzy can be sustained. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft and other A.I. companies are pouring billions of dollars into building data centers and related infrastructure to power the development of the technology, with some of the companies increasingly turning to creative financing deals to fund the expansions.

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An aerial view shows construction on a Project Stargate AI infrastructure site, a collaboration between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, in Abilene, Texas.Credit...Daniel Cole/Reuters

Critics have said many of these deals are circular chains of financing, with chipmakers, data center providers and A.I. labs trading cash and stock back and forth with no immediate promise of a return on investment. It also remains unclear if A.I. products can generate large enough revenues to justify the costs of the infrastructure boom, leading to fears of a potentially dangerous bubble.

Late Wednesday, Ms. Friar said in a LinkedIn post that using the word “backstop” had “muddied the point.”

“I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part,” she wrote.

On Thursday morning, David Sacks, the White House’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar, said the federal government had no intention of providing any kind of bailout to A.I. companies that flounder.

“The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies,” Mr. Sacks wrote on social media. “If one fails, others will take its place.”

His post stoked the debate further. On Thursday afternoon, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, weighed in.

“We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers,” Mr. Altman posted on social media. “We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market.”

An OpenAI spokesman did not provide further comment.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)

OpenAI, which is valued at $500 billion, has raised billions of dollars so it can grow and obtain computing power to develop its technology. Last month, the company completed a conversion to a for-profit structure, which allows it to operate like a more traditional company while it raises the money it needs to develop A.I. The change also sets the stage for the company to go public.

At the same time, OpenAI has signed a series of deals with some of the world’s largest technology companies — including Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia and Microsoft — that puts the start-up on the hook for more than $1 trillion of capital commitments to buy chips, computing power and data center infrastructure over the next 10 years.

On Wednesday, Ms. Friar said that OpenAI was not pursuing an initial public offering “right now” and was looking at ways to increase its revenue. That included experimental revenue-sharing agreements with enterprise customers e-commerce and potentially introducing advertising into some of its products, she said. OpenAI has said that it has more than one million enterprise customers on its platform.

On Thursday, Mr. Altman said that OpenAI expected to end this year with “$20 billion in annualized revenue” and anticipated growing to “hundreds of billions” over the next five years.

That revenue falls short of the commitments OpenAI must meet over the next decade, which is where government support could play a role in the future.

“As I said, the U.S. government has been incredibly forward-leaning and has really understood that A.I. is a national strategic asset,” Ms. Friar said on LinkedIn.

For now, she said she does not expect the A.I. boom to end.

“I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about A.I., when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals,” Ms. Friar said at Wednesday’s tech conference.

Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.

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