OpenAI Eyes 2027 IPO as Enterprise Revenue Surges, Expanding AI Cybersecurity Push and Setting Out Election-Year Policy Vision

OpenAI is pressing ahead on several fronts at once, with its president signaling IPO readiness next year, its models uncovering serious software vulnerabilities and its policy chief pitching a New Deal-style agenda for AI ahead of the 2028 election.

Speaking at a Wall Street Journal tech conference on Wednesday, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman said the company would be ready to go public in 2027, adding that he felt extremely good about the business and had never been more confident in its direction. He acknowledged that the first two quarters of 2026 were difficult and that OpenAI was not part of the agentic coding conversation, where rival Anthropic’s Claude Code gained market share, even though it had Codex. Brockman said the company kept its head down and executed, and by the third quarter annualized revenue grew 70% quarter on quarter as the enterprise business doubled. Enterprise now accounts for the majority of OpenAI’s revenue, up from around 30%, while consumer revenue has also continued to grow. Brockman cited a recent partnership with JPMorgan Chase as an example of the clients OpenAI is now winning and said that a year ago many businesses questioned whether it was truly committed to the enterprise market.

OpenAI’s models are also reshaping cybersecurity. Max Justicz, CTO and co-founder of Charge Robotics, told TechCrunch he used GPT 5.6 Sol through OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue program for defenders to find a severe vulnerability that could allow hackers to take control of servers running Ubuntu. Justicz, a hobbyist security researcher who had previously found a bug in the same codebase, said he simply pointed the model at the code and asked it to find something as bad or worse, and it returned the convoluted flaw within two hours. He reported it to the Debian Project, which issued a patch, and there is no known evidence of exploitation. Justicz warned that many more serious bugs are likely to be found and exploited in the coming months, said he had spent about $5,000 on subscriptions and tokens, and suggested OpenAI had recently weakened Daybreak Blue’s ability to find vulnerabilities.

OpenAI has now made its new cybersecurity model, ChatGPT Cyber, available to Daybreak Red, its highest tier for offensive security researchers, after using it to identify 948 potential issues in the Linux kernel and 81 novel vulnerabilities in Firefox. The company said it aims to expand Daybreak dramatically to organizations of every size, independent researchers and open source maintainers, and has committed $1 billion to support defenders of critical infrastructure such as power grids and water systems. OpenAI researcher Eric Wallace said the company is allocating significant frontier compute to finding and patching open source vulnerabilities pro bono, although the $1.2 million Linux effort was well below the roughly $6 million spent on a famous fluid dynamics problem, and only thousands of professionals currently participate in Daybreak.

On policy, OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane argued in a new essay that the 2028 election could be a defining moment for AI. He compared the technology’s economic impact to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and set out five priorities covering worker protections, education, AI safety and data center development, including tax incentives for AI skills, enforceable safety standards and kill-switch capabilities. He also warned that backing a data center moratorium could jeopardize America’s lead over China.

Kate Brennan, who leads AI and corporate power policy at the AI Now Institute, said the New Deal comparison was ahistorical, arguing the proposals assume mass AI adoption benefits society. She described OpenAI’s safety stances as disingenuous given its opposition to California’s SB 1047 in 2024, although the company has since backed several state safety laws.