ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.
OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn’t shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak.
“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the company wrote. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
The filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for the public markets. SpaceX is also expected to make its debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation, meaning three of the most closely watched companies in tech could all go public within months of each other — a concentration of high-stakes offerings the markets haven’t seen since the dot-com boom.
OpenAI is racing to IPO even as it recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, per The Wall Street Journal. Its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to support its massive data center spending. And the burn does appear to be massive.
In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history — $3 billion of which came directly from retail investors via bank channels. But the firm expects to spend roughly that same amount on computing power for AI research alone in 2028, and projects burning $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the year prior, per The Wall Street Journal. Put another way, OpenAI is asking public market investors to buy into a business that, by its own projections, won’t generate more cash than it spends for at least four more years.
SpaceX offers a parallel data point. Its AI spending, while not as massive, illustrates how the cost to train large language models can exceed the revenue those models generate — a structural challenge the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors will have to price.
Anthropic, on the other hand, has provided investors a much rosier picture of its financials, saying that it is close to achieving its first quarterly profit. Even so, with a recent $65 billion funding round and another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially on its way, Anthropic’s burn rate isn’t exactly modest.
The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to start its preparation for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared stock pricing or how much it hopes to raise yet. That said, the secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay.
Anthropic recently surged to a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassing OpenAI, which was recorded at around $880 billion in April.
David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC and overseer of the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index, which tracks the largest public and private companies in the U.S. He said Anthropic’s rate of appreciation far exceeds OpenAI this year — 123% year-to-date versus OpenAI’s 11.3%. That said, despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI isn’t seeing a lack of secondary interest.
“From a secondary investor standpoint, OpenAI had already grown into a significant portion of its valuation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch. “We haven’t seen OpenAI crater or anything close, and the valuation is still enormously successful, according to the index.”
He added that OpenAI’s stock in the secondary market “experienced a slight pop over the last few days, indicating investors may be pricing both as the ‘dual winners’ of the broader LLM race.”
But the race to get to the public markets first is a real concern. Experts say whoever makes their debut first will likely nab more of what is becoming increasingly scarce capital for AI companies — much of which may have already been absorbed by SpaceX, which is expected to IPO first among the three.
Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will set a valuation comp that constrains how OpenAI can price its own offering when it files, according to a recent PitchBook report that characterized OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals. In other words, if Anthropic prices conservatively, OpenAI’s path to its target valuation gets harder.
OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and disrupted the world of AI when it released ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of large language model advancements across the industry.
While OpenAI has expanded its products to accommodate enterprise and government customers, the firm has a strong reputation of being more consumer-focused than rival Anthropic. The company has built real scale, with around 900 million weekly active users.
The IPO comes after significant internal struggles within the company. In 2022, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman over what it described as a lack of transparency from and concerns about whether he was committed to the firm’s mission of benefiting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and the board members who were involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, departed shortly after. The episode raised governance questions that have never been fully resolved and that prospective public investors will likely scrutinize closely.
More recently, OpenAI has faced several lawsuits, including a recent one from the state of Florida accusing the company and Altman of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm, and fostering addiction among young users. Florida’s complaint adds to the litany of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers following user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events.
Last month, OpenAI prevailed at trial after co-founder and rival Elon Musk sued the company and Altman over an alleged promise to keep the company a nonprofit. The case was ultimately tossed out after both a jury and judge found Musk had waited too long to file — he was beyond the statute of limitations when he filed the case in 2024.
OpenAI has also faced criticism after its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political action committee dedicated to thwarting local politicians who advocate for AI regulation. Both also made similar contributions to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has tried to distance itself from what it calls Brockman’s personal donations, saying the funds were not provided on behalf of the company.
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