OpenAI has filed preliminary IPO paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, joining Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a wave of artificial intelligence companies preparing to go public.
The company announced the confidential S-1 filing on Monday. Anthropic submitted its own confidential filing on June 1, and SpaceX recently launched an IPO roadshow and is expected to begin trading within days.
A confidential filing allows a company to submit financial information to regulators for review before making it public. OpenAI has said it has not yet decided on the timing of its IPO.
“We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We haven’t decided on the timing yet. It might be a while because there are things we want to do that are probably easier as a private company.
But it’s a complex set of tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that turns out to be the best choice.”
Financials, Valuation, and Why OpenAI Says It Needs an IPO
OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion and has raised more than $180 billion in funding. CFO Sarah Friar told The Associated Press that the company’s valuation would place 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 allowing employees to sell shares at the current valuation, according to a person familiar with the plans.
OpenAI has not publicly disclosed its revenues or a timeline for profitability. The company continues to spend more than it earns 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 coming at a difficult time for OpenAI, noting that the company seems to be losing its early lead in both 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 more than 900 million weekly active users. Anthropic recently closed a funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s figure, just before its own confidential SEC filing.
SpaceX, which merged with Musk’s xAI earlier this year, lists OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as key competitors in its IPO prospectus.
If SpaceX’s offering is successful, Anthropic and OpenAI may face pressure to speed up their own plans, given the capital each company is trying to raise.
OpenAI officially became a public benefit corporation last year, while still being controlled by a nonprofit parent organization. Friar told CNBC in April that it is considered good practice for a company of OpenAI’s size to operate like a public company, noting that OpenAI was already measuring revenue in a way similar to publicly traded firms reporting to the SEC.
This filing comes after the conclusion of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. A federal advisory jury determined Musk delayed too long in pursuing claims that OpenAI violated its nonprofit commitments, and a federal judge dismissed the case last month. Musk has indicated that he plans to appeal.
Altman’s ‘Third Phase’ Vision for OpenAI
Alongside the IPO news, CEO Sam Altman posted a separate blog entry outlining what he called the third phase of OpenAI. He described the first phase as foundational research, the second as creating a product company that learned how people use AI tools, and the third as providing advanced AI to everyone as the economy evolves.
Altman outlined three goals: developing an automated AI researcher, boosting economic growth, and making a personal artificial general intelligence accessible to everyone.
These comments came after 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 the Filing
OpenAI has recently sharpened its product focus. The company shut down Sora, its short-form video app, and shifted resources toward its enterprise business and Codex, its AI coding assistant.
Codex is now a direct competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code. Altman recently described the product as having its own “ChatGPT-style moment.”
OpenAI has not announced a specific date for a public IPO. The company said that its confidential filing provides the option to go public sooner if market conditions are favorable.
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