According to a Wall Street Journal exclusive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman floated a plan late last year to spin off the company's robotics and consumer hardware divisions into independent entities. The idea was to let them raise their own funding and operate separately, so they wouldn't drag down the core business. But the proposal was shot down — partly because OpenAI determined any new spun-out entity would still need to be consolidated into the parent company's financial statements, defeating the purpose of the separation.
The move underscores the strategic trade-offs OpenAI is making as it races toward an IPO. Altman has long greenlit projects far beyond the company's flagship chatbot, but the pressure to focus is mounting: its core business is falling behind Anthropic, internal user and revenue targets are being missed, and the video-generation tool Sora was killed off to free up compute. OpenAI is now pivoting around a new "super app" targeting developers and enterprise customers.
Sources say OpenAI could revisit the spinoff plan in the future, modeling it after Google's 2015 Alphabet restructuring, which separated core search from long-term bets like Waymo. The two divisions eyed for separation are already operating independently within OpenAI, reporting directly to Altman. The hardware unit — which last May acquired Jony Ive's io company and its roughly 55 employees in a $6.5 billion stock deal — is described internally as a "startup within the company."