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Apr 28, 2026
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Happy Tuesday! OpenAI missed an internal revenue goal during the first quarter. More than 600 Google employees ask CEO Sundar Pichai to reject a deal with the Pentagon to use Google’s AI on classified work. Microsoft gives up exclusive rights to sell OpenAI models.
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OpenAI missed an internal revenue goal during the first quarter, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, after the company’s ChatGPT chat previously missed user-growth goals. The missed goals followed a surge or usage of Google’s Gemini chatbot and booming sales at archrival Anthropic, whose revenue has nearly closed the gap with OpenAI despite being founded five years later. The internal revenue miss, however, doesn’t mean that the company will miss the $30 billion 2026 revenue target it has shared with investors, up from around $13 billion in 2025 revenue. The company has also projected it would burn $25 billion this year, compared to an $8 billion cash burn in 2025. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar have diverged on the prospective timing of an initial public offering for the
company, which Altman has wanted to accelerate. Friar didn’t believe the company would be ready to go public in 2026 because of the procedural and organizational work needed and the risks from its spending commitments, and she wasn’t sure yet whether OpenAI revenue growth, which has been slowing, would support the server spending commitments OpenAI has made, The Information reported earlier this month. The Information earlier reported on the ChatGPT user miss in March and the Wall Street Journal earlier reported the revenue miss. Spokespeople for the company did not have a comment.
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More than 600 Google employees signed a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking him to reject a proposed deal with the Department of Defense to use Google’s AI on classified work. “We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways,” employees wrote in the letter to Pichai, which was delivered on Monday. “This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond.” The letter linked to an article in The Information earlier this month that first reported Google was in talks with the Pentagon for a deal that would make its AI available for the Pentagon for all lawful uses. Google has proposed language specifying that its AI should not be used for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, two use cases that have become a flash point
for AI researchers concerned about military AI use. But lawyers criticized similar provisions in OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon, saying that it wouldn’t actually prevent such use cases. Spokespeople for Google and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Microsoft and OpenAI amended the terms of their arrangement, allowing OpenAI to sell its models on competing cloud providers, the companies said on Monday. The companies also scrapped a controversial clause in their deal that would have granted Microsoft a share of OpenAI’s revenue and certain IP rights up until OpenAI achieved “artificial general intelligence,” or AI on par with a human. Microsoft will now keep getting a share of OpenAI’s revenue until 2030 regardless of whether the startup achieves AGI, the companies said. Microsoft will also retain the rights
to use OpenAI’s models and products until 2032, but Microsoft’s rights to the IP will no longer be exclusive. Microsoft will also stop sharing some of the revenue it makes from selling OpenAI models on Azure. Up until now, Microsoft shared 20% of the revenue from those sales with OpenAI, while OpenAI shared 20% of its total revenue back to Microsoft. OpenAI will keep sharing revenue with Microsoft through 2030, the companies said Monday. The amended deal, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and their deputies hammered out over the last several weeks, was designed to resolve legal questions that arose from OpenAI’s plans to sell AI products on Amazon Web Services, according to someone briefed on the deal talks. The new agreement resolves those concerns by letting OpenAI sell its technology anywhere.
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The jurors who will decide the winner in the artificial intelligence era’s big legal fight come from a range of backgrounds—and have mixed experiences with AI. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers impaneled the nine-member jury on Monday, kicking off Elon Musk’s breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI. The jurors include seven women and two men, with professions including a caretaker, a nurse, and a painter. Two are retired, including one former program manager for Lockheed Martin. Six of the panel members described themselves as immigrants, from countries including Mexico, the Philippines, Guatemala and Pakistan. Two of the nine said they do not use AI, two others said AI is helpful for their jobs and another two said AI makes their work take longer than
ever because they have to double check its output for mistakes. A couple of the jurors also indicated that they had some negative feelings toward Musk, but they said they could set those feelings aside to evaluate the evidence presented at trial. “My displeasure is politically related,” said one of the jurors, who added that his concerns do not extend to Musk’s business dealings.
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Meta Platforms is preparing for a possible unwinding of its $2 billion acquisition of AI agent application Manus, after Chinese regulators ordered that the parties involved in the deal revoke the transaction, The Wall Street Journal reported. Undoing the acquisition could be complicated as Meta has already started integrating Manus’s technology into its systems, according to the Journal. Manus’s investors, including U.S. venture capital firm Benchmark, have already received their returns from the deal. Manus was developed by Butterfly Effect, a startup that was initially founded in China. But after Manus went viral in March last year and subsequently got financial backing from Benchmark, the startup moved its headquarters to Singapore and shut down its China offices. The startup’s decision to leave China came
after Benchmark’s investment drew scrutiny from Washington due to U.S. rules that limit American investments in Chinese AI companies. Meta’s acquisition, which was announced in December, and Manus’s earlier decision to move out of China, came under scrutiny from China’s regulators early this year. On Monday, an agency under the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s economic policy planner, said it had made a decision to prohibit “foreign acquisition of the Manus project in accordance with laws and regulations,” without giving specific reasons.
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