Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) “Three products killed in seven days. That's the number that tells you where Open” — TopicDigg

Three products killed in seven days. That's the number that tells you where OpenAI actually is right now. Monday: Instant Checkout scrapped. Only 12 Shopify merchants ever went live. Walmart said conversion rates inside ChatGPT were 3x lower than on their own site. Six months of "agentic commerce" produced almost nothing. Tuesday: Sora shut down entirely. Disney's $1 billion investment collapsed before any money changed hands. Their teams were working on Sora projects Monday evening and got blindsided by the announcement 30 minutes later. Downloads had already fallen 32% month over month by December. Thursday: Erotic chatbot shelved indefinitely. Internally called "Citron mode." They couldn't train models that previously avoided explicit content to reliably exclude illegal behavior. A senior employee quit over it. Their age-verification system has a 10%+ error rate. Now look at the financials behind these decisions. OpenAI hit $25 billion in annualized revenue in February. They're projecting $14 billion in losses for 2026 and $17 billion in cash burn. The IPO is targeting Q4 2026 at an $840 billion valuation. They need to file an S-1 in months. Every one of these killed products was a liability on that S-1. E-commerce checkout with no tax compliance infrastructure. A video app burning compute with falling downloads. An adult chatbot while the FTC is investigating AI harm to minors and Meta just got hit with $375 million in a child exploitation case. This is what pre-IPO cleanup looks like at $840 billion. You kill everything that creates a headline risk, consolidate into a "superapp" that combines ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas, and pray the coding market is big enough to justify 65x revenue. The Pentagon contract was the tell. OpenAI rushed a $200 million defense deal the same day Anthropic got blacklisted, admitted it was sloppy, then spent a week rewriting the terms. That's a company optimizing for one thing: making the investor deck look inevitable before the roadshow starts.