ChatGPT developer OpenAI has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, intensifying competition between the two AI companies.
OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, has filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its proposed IPO. OpenAI has not yet disclosed details. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak.
“We have not determined the timing yet, but it may take some time as it may be easier to do this as a private company,” the company wrote. “However, this is a complex set of trade-offs that ultimately gives us the option to go public sooner if that is in our best interest.”
Around the same time, in a separate blog post, OpenAI issued a comprehensive philosophical statement about its mission, vision for AGI, and belief that AI should benefit all humanity. This is the type of positive communication that companies that have entered a quiet period have historically avoided. The fact that OpenAI seems comfortable with releasing near-confidential applications says something about the regulatory environment in which it operates, not necessarily about its own legal judgment. The SEC under the Trump administration has been far less intrusive with tech and AI companies than it was under the previous administration, so OpenAI may just be reading the air.
Whatever the regulatory questions, the filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for public markets. SpaceX is also expected to debut at a valuation of $1.75 trillion, meaning three of the technology industry’s hottest companies could go public at once in the coming months, a concentration of high-stakes ventures the market hasn’t seen since the dot-com boom.
According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is racing toward an IPO despite recently falling short of its own goals for new users and revenue. The company’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, reportedly expressed concern that OpenAI might not be able to support massive data center spending. And the burns seem to be quite severe.
In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history. Of this, $3 billion was raised directly from retail investors through banking channels. But the company expects to spend about the same amount on computing power in 2028 on AI research alone, and even after its revenue doubles from a year ago, it expects to burn $85 billion that year, the Wall Street Journal reported. In other words, OpenAI is asking public market investors to invest in a business that, according to its own projections, will not generate more cash than it spends for at least another four years.
SpaceX provides parallel data points. While the company’s AI spending isn’t huge, it shows how the cost of training large language models can exceed the revenue those models generate. This is a structural challenge that the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors need to price.
Meanwhile, Anthropic said it was close to achieving its first quarterly profit, giving investors a much more optimistic picture of the company’s financial health. Still, with a recent $65 billion funding round and potentially another $36 billion in debt allocated to chips in the pipeline, Anthropic’s burn rate is anything but modest.
The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to begin preparing to go public without disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, so the company has not yet disclosed its stock price or the amount it hopes to raise. That said, the secondary market can give you a glimpse of what investors are willing to pay.
Anthropic recently saw its valuation on Forge Global, a retail distribution market platform, soar to $1 trillion, surpassing OpenAI, which was valued at about $880 billion in April.
David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC and overseer of the NYSE OpenVC 500 index, which tracks the largest U.S. public and private companies, said Anthropic’s gains have far outpaced OpenAI’s this year, at 123% year-to-date, compared to OpenAI’s 11.3%. That said, despite Anthropic’s obvious push, OpenAI is not devoid of secondary interest.
“From a secondary investor perspective, OpenAI had already grown to a significant portion of its valuation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch. “Although we have not seen anything like OpenAI Crater up close, the evaluation is still very successful according to the index.”
He added that OpenAI’s stock price in the secondary market “has experienced a slight spike over the past few days, indicating that investors may be pricing in both as ‘double winners’ in the broader LLM race.”
But the competition to be first to the public market is a real concern. Whoever debuts first will likely capture more of the capital that is increasingly scarce for AI companies, much of which may already have been absorbed by SpaceX, which is expected to be the first of the three to IPO, experts said.
Furthermore, according to a recent PitchBook report that characterized OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals, Anthropic’s filing disclosure will set a valuation that will limit how OpenAI will price its products at the time of filing. In other words, if Anthropic prices conservatively, OpenAI will have a harder road to reaching its target valuation.
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization, OpenAI disrupted the world of AI with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of massive language model advancements across the industry.
Although OpenAI has expanded its offerings to serve enterprise and government customers, the company has a strong reputation for being more consumer-focused than rival Anthropic. The company has built real scale and has around 900 million weekly active users.
The IPO came after significant internal struggles within the company. In 2022, OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman, citing a lack of transparency and concerns about the company’s commitment to its mission of benefiting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and board members involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Satskeva, resigned shortly after. This episode raised governance issues that have not yet been fully resolved and are likely to be scrutinized closely by public investors in the future.
OpenAI has faced several lawsuits in recent days, including a recent lawsuit from the state of Florida that accuses the company and Mr. Altman of harming children by providing information to school shooters, teaching self-harm, and promoting addiction among young users. The Florida complaint adds to the growing number of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers following incidents of user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualties.
OpenAI won a lawsuit last month after co-founder and rival Elon Musk sued the company and Altman over promises to keep the company nonprofit. The case was ultimately thrown out after both the jury and judge decided that Musk had waited too long. By the time Musk filed his lawsuit in 2024, the statute of limitations had passed.
OpenAI has also come under fire for the fact that its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political action committee dedicated to blocking local politicians who advocate for AI regulation. Both men made similar donations to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has sought to distance itself from Brockman’s so-called personal donations, saying the funds were not provided on behalf of the company.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
