Worldcoin (WLD) Co-Founder Sam Altman's OpenAI Targets $30B Raise at $1.4T Valuation

OpenAI Chases $30B at $1.4T

OpenAI, the AI lab co-founded by Sam Altman — who also created the Worldcoin project behind the Worldcoin (WLD) token — is in early-stage talks to raise at least $30 billion in new capital at a pre-money valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion, people familiar with the matter said on September 29. If completed, the round, internally positioned as a pre-IPO bridge, would mark a steep jump from the company's March raise of about $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation that included new funds. Altman has shelved a 2026 public listing, calling the present climate an ill-advised moment for an IPO as regulatory scrutiny of AI safety and security incidents intensifies. Talks remain preliminary and terms could change; no term sheet has been signed and no lead investors are named. The pressure is not abstract either — the White House has reportedly pressed OpenAI to delay UK AI tests, adding a political layer to the fundraise calculus.

Annualized Revenue Nears $70B

The revenue picture behind the ask is strengthening quickly. OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue has climbed more than 70% since the start of the third quarter and is approaching $70 billion, while business customers are joining at close to twice the July pace. ChatGPT's consumer business booked more revenue in Q3 alone than it generated across all of 2025. The turn is recent: as of August 18, quarterly growth measured just 18%, from $5.7 billion to $6.7 billion between Q1 and Q2, while Anthropic more than doubled from $4.73 billion to $11.6 billion and posted a $559 million annualized operating profit. Six weeks later, OpenAI's corporate line became its fastest-growing segment. Costs remain the counterweight — operating losses appear to have widened to $12.3 billion in Q2 from $9.3 billion in Q1 — which is precisely the gap a $30 billion private raise is meant to bridge before any Wall Street debut.

GPT-6.1 Sol Cuts Cached Input 95%

At DevDay 2026, OpenAI also shipped product. Its new mid-tier flagship, GPT-6.1 Sol, is pitched as near-Astra intelligence at a fifth of the price, per the company's official X announcement. API pricing sits at $2 per million input tokens and $10 for output, but cached input drops to $0.10 per million — 95% below the standard rate and roughly 50% cheaper than GPT-6 Sol's cached price. Benchmarks show gains of 6.4 points over the predecessor on DeepSWE v1.1 and about 7 points on OSWorld 2.0, alongside a lower factual error rate and alignment scores closing in on Astra. The model is live now for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu tiers through ChatGPT Work and Codex, with an Ultrafast variant teased. It extends the price reset OpenAI began when it halved GPT-6 prices across Sol and Luna.

@OpenAI · X post

Per the company's official X announcement.

View on X

“dots” Agent Spans 4,000+ Apps

The second DevDay launch is dots, an always-on agent powered by GPT-6 Astra. Rather than a question-and-answer chat window, dots operates like an AI trading bot for work tasks: running continuously, connecting to more than 4,000 apps and learning user habits in the background, from booking a restaurant to carrying projects at the scale of a senior engineer. It runs on its own dedicated cloud computer rather than the user's device, with explicit user-set boundaries on which tasks it may complete unaided. OpenAI announced dots on its official X account, a post that drew more than 400,000 views within hours. Rollout begins with ChatGPT Pro, Business Premium and Enterprise customers on web, mobile and desktop, with voice calls and an enterprise preview of “Specialist dots” planned. Altman, who separately urged the UN to oversee AI decisions, keeps widening the footprint that Worldcoin (WLD) sentiment tracks. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

@OpenAI · X post

Announced dots on its official X account.

View on X

WLD Watch: Unconfirmed Terms

Bloomberg-sourced detail adds texture to the raise: investor demand is the main driver of the round, with size and terms still fluid, and OpenAI has declined to comment on the plan. The $1.4 trillion pre-money target would sit roughly 64% above the March post-money figure. Notably, OpenAI had confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in June, but a listing is now seen slipping to 2027 at the earliest, making private capital the company's key funding channel as it keeps pouring money into model training and compute infrastructure. The round also mirrors a sector-wide valuation climb — rival Anthropic, meanwhile, is advancing its own IPO with a filing that seeks a valuation above $2 trillion.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus, filed confidentially with the SEC in June, shows the rival plans at least $518 billion in AI infrastructure spending over roughly ten years across six partners — one of the largest buildout commitments on record — with about 80% of that total non-cancellable on take-or-pay terms regardless of usage. Per the filing, Broadcom carries the single largest obligation at roughly $161.2 billion in largely irrevocable hardware leases, while an xAI agreement could generate up to $84.5 billion in Nvidia compute spend by 2029, mostly cancellable on 90 days' notice, and AMD has committed to buy up to $5 billion of Anthropic stock alongside more than $20 billion in compute capacity. The listing, which could top $2 trillion — more than double its May valuation of about $965 billion — may slip past the November US midterm elections, and company-reported annualized revenue had reached $65 billion by late July.

(as of 05:21 UTC) For Worldcoin (WLD), the arc is direct: every major Altman headline — a $30 billion raise attempt, $70 billion revenue momentum, two product launches in a single day — feeds the narrative gravity around his adjacent crypto venture. Discipline still applies. No round is signed, no lead investors are named, and the $1.4 trillion figure is a pre-money target circulating in early talks, not a company-confirmed valuation; treat it as undisclosed until OpenAI's own disclosures say otherwise. Whether flows into Altman-linked assets prove conviction or FUD, the token's market cap has historically moved with these cycles, and the Worldcoin ecosystem now watches for signed term sheets next.