OpenAI has filed preliminary IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, joining the likes of Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the wave of artificial intelligence companies preparing to go public.
The company announced a confidential S-1 filing on Monday. Anthropic submitted its confidential filing on June 1, and SpaceX recently launched an IPO roadshow and expects to begin trading within days.
A confidential filing allows a company to submit financial information to regulators for review before making it public. OpenAI said it has not yet decided on the timing of its IPO.
“We expected this to be leaked so we are announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We haven’t decided on the timing yet. It may take some time because there are some things we want to do that are probably easier as a private company.
But it’s a complex set of tradeoffs, and it gives us the option to go public sooner if that proves to be the best option.”
Financials, Valuation, and Why OpenAI Says It Needs an IPO
OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion and has raised over $180 billion in funding. CFO Sarah Fryer told The Associated Press that the company’s valuation would put it among the 15 largest companies in the S&P 500.
The company is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on its filing, the same two investment banks listed at the top of SpaceX’s prospectus.
OpenAI also plans to run a tender offer to allow employees to sell shares at the current valuation, according to a person familiar with the plans.
OpenAI has not publicly disclosed its revenue or profitability timelines. The company continues to spend more than its income while securing compute capacity and infrastructure for training and running AI models.
Competitive pressure, corporate structure, and the AI IPO wave
eMarketer analyst Nate Elliott described the filing as a difficult time for OpenAI, noting that the company appears to be losing its early lead in both the consumer and business markets to Google and Anthropic. “But OpenAI doesn’t have many other options to find the large amounts of capital needed to cover its expenses,” Elliott said.
ChatGPT launched in 2022 and now has over 900 million weekly active users. Anthropic recently closed a funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s figure just ahead of its confidential SEC filing.
SpaceX, which merged with Musk’s XAI earlier this year, lists OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as major competitors in its IPO prospectus.
If SpaceX’s offering is successful, Anthropic and OpenAI may face pressure to accelerate their plans, given that each company is trying to raise capital.
OpenAI officially became a public benefit corporation last year, while it is still controlled by a non-profit parent organization. Fryer told CNBC in April that it was considered good practice for a company of OpenAI’s size to operate like a public company, noting that OpenAI was already measuring revenues similar to publicly traded firms reporting to the SEC.
The filing comes after the conclusion of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. A federal subpoena jury determined that Musk left too late to pursue claims that OpenAI violated its non-profit commitments, and a federal judge dismissed the case last month. Musk has indicated he plans to appeal.
Altman’s ‘Phase Three’ vision for OpenAI
Along with the IPO news, CEO Sam Altman posted a separate blog entry in which he outlined OpenAI’s Phase 3. He described the first phase as fundamental research, the second as building a product company that learns how people use AI tools, and the third as providing advanced AI to everyone as the economy develops.
Altman stated three goals: developing an automated AI researcher, promoting economic growth, and making personal artificial general intelligence accessible to everyone.
These comments follow Altman’s recent meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders, who has proposed requiring the public to hold at least a 50 percent ownership stake in AI companies, including OpenAI.
President Donald Trump has also shown support for giving the public a stake in AI development.
OpenAI’s internal product focus after filing
OpenAI has recently sharpened its product focus. The company shut down its short-form video app Sora, and shifted resources toward its enterprise business and Codex, its AI coding assistant.
Codex is now a direct competitor to Anthropic’s Cloud Code. Altman recently described the product as his own “ChatGPT-style moment”.
OpenAI has not announced any specific date for the public IPO. The company said its confidential filing provides an option to go public soon if market conditions are favorable.
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