Will ChatGPT survive 2026? Some are bidding farewell to OpenAI
With the introduction of adverts in ChatGPT and a $134 billion lawsuit from Elon Musk, OpenAI may run out of money in the next 18 months or sooner.
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Experts say OpenAI’s decision to introduce ads in ChatGPT is a risky business move that will create dangerous incentives in terms of user privacy.
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The ad rollout may signal the perilous state of OpenAI, as Altman has previously called it “the last resort” for business.
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Some predict the company may run out of money in the next 18 months or sooner.
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Google and Anthropic will be the winners in the event of OpenAI’s potential failure.
After months of speculation, OpenAI officially confirmed in early January that it plans to start testing ads in the US for the ChatGPT Free and Go tiers.
The company explained that ads will not influence the chatbot's answers, but will be “separate and clearly labelled,” addressing concerns that ads could be woven into regular ChatGPT conversations.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously called ads in ChatGPT “the last resort” for the company, describing the blend of advertising and artificial intelligence (AI) as “sort of uniquely unsettling.”
The same day, Musk filed a court action seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages for the wrongful gains OpenAI and Microsoft have earned. Musk says he was defrauded of the $38 million in seed funding he provided to the company in 2015.
The ad introduction and Musk’s court filing raised questions about the future of OpenAI, which generates significant revenue but has not turned a profit.
Luiza Jarovsky, the CEO of the AI, Tech & Privacy Academy, has predicted that the company might not survive 2026, describing Musk’s court filing as “the most catastrophic development” for OpenAI.
“Meanwhile, the low-profile, low-drama Google and Anthropic rejoice with every new court filing against OpenAI and quietly hope for its death by a thousand cuts,” Jarovsky wrote on X.
While ChatGPT remains the most used chatbot in the world, Google Gemini's explosive growth has outpaced ChatGPT’s in late 2025, prompting Altman to declare a “code red” and delay the ad rollout.
As users are leaving ChatGPT for Gemini and Claude, some breakups are very public.
An entrepreneur, Jason Calacani, announced to his one million X users that he cancelled his corporate OpenAI account, which he had spent $10,000 a year on, because “ChatGPT isn’t keeping up.”
He said Claude was much better for corporate work.
Ads won’t help the massive burn rate
OpenAI is starting down a risky path by introducing ads, according to Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab.
Even if AI platforms don’t share data directly with advertisers, business models based on targeted advertising create particularly dangerous incentives for user privacy.
“People are using chatbots for all sorts of reasons, including as companions and advisors. There’s a lot at stake when that tool tries to exploit users’ trust to hawk advertisers’ goods,” Bogen wrote on LinkedIn.
Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir, says it is unlikely that revenues from non-ad subscriptions or ads themselves will make much of a dent in OpenAI's massive burn rate.
OpenAI has raised its projected cash burn through 2029 to $115 billion in September, up by $80 billion from previous estimates, the Information reported. This year alone, the company is expected to burn over $17 billion.
At the same time, Wettemann says the question arises about how ChatGPT ads will impact Google and its ad revenues.
She tells Cybernews, “The expectation that users will move to ChatGPT and other chatbots instead of Google to search information or compare shops hasn't come true quite yet. ChatGPT going into ads flips this dynamism.”
“Running out of cash in 18 months”
It is too early to say how ChatGPT ads will play out, but some paint a very bleak picture for OpenAI. Author and analyst Sebastian Mallaby, in his recent The New York Times essay, predicted that OpenAI will run out of money in the next 18 months.
Mallaby argued that companies like Google and Meta, which earn substantial revenue from legacy businesses, can afford to spend billions of dollars on their AI products, a luxury OpenAI cannot afford.
OpenAI isn't a bootstrapping startup and has plenty of cushion, Wettemann says, but it will face challenges in securing more sweetheart deals in the future.
She says, “Economic uncertainty, talk of an AI bubble, and questions about whether AI will ever be worth it from a return-on-investment perspective will make it harder for OpenAI to raise more capital.”
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