This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 2nd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

With ChatGPT, OpenAI launched the biggest tech trend in a decade. It looked unbeatable. But now CEO Sam Altman’s operation is shaking. What is happening inside the world’s leading AI company?

It is an unusual gathering of powerful figures standing in a row in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

It is January 2025 and Donald Trump takes to the podium. Beside him stand two of the world’s most influential tech billionaires — SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Furthest out stands the youngest and least wealthy of them all: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. He looks a little uncomfortable in a dark suit and brown shoes.

But Altman has travelled from Silicon Valley and dressed up for a reason.

Together with the other men, he is about to present Stargate — a gigantic AI investment in the US, costing up to 500 billion dollars.

The scale was compared to the Manhattan Project, through which the first atomic bomb was developed in the 1940s.

A year later, it is clear that nothing of that calibre will materialise.

The men in suits could not cooperate and the Stargate project has stagnated. Instead of a joint investment in data centres, new partners have had to step in and build. OpenAI — which needs enormous amounts of computing power for its AI services — will end up renting it from others rather than building its own.

The reason for this is simple. OpenAI cannot afford it. And according to The Information, they cannot borrow the money either.

This, along with several recently abandoned projects, points to a new strategy for the AI industry’s market leader.

A radical shift appears to be under way.

Stargate is not the only project to have been forced into major changes quickly. In December last year, Disney invested one billion dollars in OpenAI and announced a collaboration involving the animation giant’s many characters. Through OpenAI’s video app Sora, users could make their own Disney videos — legally and with copyright secured.

Just 103 days later, the fun was over. On 24 March, OpenAI announced that it was shutting down Sora and several other video creation services.

Disney said it “respected” the decision to focus elsewhere, but it clearly did not look good. The agreement between them could have set the standard for AI and the film industry in Hollywood. Instead it became an embarrassing belly-flop.

There are two reasons for this rapid reversal — and both relate to money in different ways.

The first is about focus. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s COO Fidji Simo told her staff they did not have time to be distracted by “side projects.” Admittedly, no one called Sora a side project when it was launched. But in contrast to what Simo wants the company to focus on, one can understand the categorisation.

OpenAI is now to concentrate on “productivity” — and enterprise productivity in particular. Companies that can pay their way.

The second reason behind Sora’s closure is pure cost-cutting. Creating video with AI is extraordinarily expensive and requires very large amounts of computing capacity. OpenAI can put that to better use elsewhere. Relative to how little money video as a category brings in, it is clear that Sora cost substantially more than it was worth.

Sora is not alone in being shut down. That list is long.

Together with e-commerce company Shopify, they were going to launch the ability to buy products directly within ChatGPT. That project has also been scrapped.

And the “erotic chatbot” that was promised has been on ice for a couple of days.

Many are also waiting for the hardware product that OpenAI is to release with Apple’s former chief designer, Jony Ive. According to information from American courts, it has now been pushed back to 2027.

Given the above, one might ask a simple but in this context unusual question. Is OpenAI short of money?

What makes it unusual is that OpenAI has raised around 168 billion dollars in various forms of financing. One might think that should be enough for most things.

As a comparison, that is more than the entire Swedish government budget for a year.

Despite this, there is much to suggest that the money is beginning to run out — or at least that the costs visible on the horizon will exceed revenues for a long time to come. The company’s own forecast points to losses of around 14 billion dollars — just this year. In total, OpenAI estimates it will take around 111 billion dollars — approximately 1,000 billion kronor — before it turns profitable in 2030.

Anyone who has ever seen, or made, such a forecast knows that at best it is an educated guess. Nobody knows what the real number might be.

But the strangest thing of all is how the company found itself in this pressured situation, and what it now plans to do differently.

To understand that, we need to go back a couple of years.

The icon showed a white “N” against a teal gradient. Double-click it and the entire world’s internet opened up for home users. The “N” stood for “Netscape Navigator” — the popular web browser of the day that let users surf the web. Something that was new at the time, in the mid-1990s.

In this world, Netscape quickly became dominant. The browser was released in 1996 and just two years later it was reported to have 38 million users. That made it the world’s most popular PC software ever, at that point in time.

With a market share of around 89 percent, Netscape looked unbeatable. Like OpenAI, they were overwhelmingly the largest — and were introducing a new paradigm of technology to the public.

The success would prove short-lived.

Despite the initial triumph, it took just two years before Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, overtook it. That same year, 1998, Netscape had 452 million dollars in revenues but made a loss of 159 million dollars.

Compared with today’s AI figures, it almost sounds quaint. Just 159 million dollars in losses in a year?

But at the time, the loss resembled a black hole. The following year Netscape was acquired by AOL, and the decline just continued. By 2002 the market share was just above three percent.

The market’s overwhelming leader — those who introduced the concept of the “web browser” to the public — had fallen.

Netscape was consigned to the history books.

Even if OpenAI is not exactly like Netscape, there is a lesson to be learned.

Being first to market is a good start — but not necessarily more than just that. What is usually called “first mover advantage” is often fairly short-lived.

Even when it comes to entirely new categories of software, market shares can shift quickly. Those who were around early may also remember AltaVista — the undisputed biggest and best search engine of its day. Then Google came along. Everyone knows how that ended.

It seems as though OpenAI is beginning to grasp this. It is therefore more important than ever that the many billions they have raised in investment last longer.

They need to hold out against competitors and a changing market.

Standing in the way of OpenAI’s world domination are two siblings who were previously employed by Sam Altman: Dario and Daniela Amodei, founders of the AI company Anthropic and the chatbot Claude.

With its beige app and somewhat more talkative style, Claude has quickly become many people’s favourite AI tool. They have been around since 2021, when the Amodei siblings left OpenAI along with several colleagues.

Anthropic is now growing substantially at OpenAI’s expense. But this is due more to OpenAI making poor decisions than to Anthropic suddenly becoming so much better.

Take the recent Pentagon incident. When Anthropic refused to let the US Department of Defense use Claude for all conceivable purposes, it became a major conflict. The military threatened to classify the company as a “supply chain risk,” which would have pressured many others to stop working with them. Anthropic in turn sued the Trump administration.

Into the vacuum that emerged stepped Sam Altman and OpenAI. From the outside it appeared as though they agreed to everything Anthropic had opposed, though the exact details of what transpired are not known. Nonetheless, the signal value was enormous — had Altman’s sense of responsibility for AI safety disappeared? Many users accustomed to AI products have been able to switch easily to Claude.

Another reason for Anthropic’s sudden success relates to the focus that OpenAI COO Fidji Simo called for above. While OpenAI invested in AI-generated video and a long series of different projects, Anthropic focused on a specific segment of the market: enterprises — and those working with programming in particular.

The products Claude Code and Cowork have quickly become extraordinarily popular. Programmers have gone from writing code themselves to instructing and verifying the code that AI systems build.

Anthropic’s strategy is smart. In this customer segment one finds those who are most likely the fastest — and most eager — to use AI services.

The success was immediate. OpenAI has a similar product, Codex, with which one can programme. But it has been somewhat lost among all the other initiatives under way.

When COO Simo talks about focus, this is what she means.

OpenAI needs to become more like Anthropic.

It is not always easy being the market leader. The defectors at Anthropic are showing the way to enterprises. Google, after a weak start, has caught up considerably and has well-stocked coffers. The queue of companies wanting access to the attractive AI market is long.

Can OpenAI adapt in time? An IPO looms — and with it a new funding lifeline.

But Netscape was listed on the stock exchange too, back in the 1990s.

And you know what happened to them.