*Epistemic Status: High confidence in the financial analysis, moderate confidence in the technical thesis, acknowledging genuine uncertainty about what "AGI" even means. This is a strong claim and I'm making it knowing I could be wrong.*

## The Thesis

OpenAI will not build artificial general intelligence. They will not be the organization that delivers transformative scientific breakthroughs to humanity. Not because building AGI is impossible, but because OpenAI—as currently constituted—is structurally incapable of doing so. They are a company optimizing for the wrong things, building with the wrong approach, and operating under financial constraints that make long-term research impossible.

This is not a claim about whether AGI is achievable. It might be. This is a claim about *who* will achieve it if anyone does—and why that organization is almost certainly not OpenAI.

## Part I: The Financial Impossibility

Let me begin with the numbers, because they are genuinely staggering.

OpenAI lost $12 billion in Q3 2025 alone—a single quarter. According to Microsoft's fiscal disclosures, this is actual audited accounting, not the figures selectively leaked to reporters. For context, this quarterly loss nearly equals the $13.5 billion OpenAI reported losing in the *entire first half of 2025*, during which they generated only $4.3 billion in revenue.

The company expects to rack up $74 billion in operating losses in 2028—three-quarters of that year's projected revenue—before pivoting to meaningful profits by 2030. Their cumulative cash burn through 2029 is projected at $115 billion. They have committed to $1.4 trillion in compute spending over the next eight years.

Compare this to Anthropic, their closest competitor. Anthropic forecasts dropping its cash burn to roughly one-third of revenue in 2026 and down to 9% by 2027. OpenAI, by contrast, expects its burn rate to remain at 57% through 2027. OpenAI will burn through roughly 14 times as much cash as Anthropic before turning a profit.

These numbers matter because AGI research is a long game. If you believe AGI requires fundamental breakthroughs—not just scaling—then you need an organization capable of surviving multiple research winters, exploring dead ends, and maintaining institutional knowledge over decades. OpenAI is structured as a hypergrowth startup that must hit specific revenue...

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