OpenAI officially goes public. The artificial intelligence giant announced Monday that it has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We hope it leaks, so we’re just announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We haven’t decided on the timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are probably easier as a private company. 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 so far confidential, meaning the masses won’t be able to see the highly coveted details of OpenAI’s finances and its murky path to profitability until the SEC makes it public. Companies tend to prefer confidential filings because it helps them seek regulatory approval before submitting financial information to public scrutiny, a smart move considering OpenAI already has many critical eyes on itself.
OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billionand information They say executives are targeting a stock valuation of up to $1 trillion.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit AI lab. Ten years later, at the end of 2025, the former nonprofit completed its recapitalization process to become a for-profit public benefit corporation.
OpenAI is credited with starting the AI hype cycle by launching ChatGPT in 2022.
Although the company’s chatbot is so popular that “ChatGPT” has become practically synonymous with the word “AI chatbot,” that leadership position has contested In recent months, competitors Anthropic and Google have stepped up and dazzled users with high-profile launches. The comparisons were so bad that OpenAI declared “code red” in December, even before Anthropic made headlines with Claude Cowork in February and Mythos in April.
The road to this IPO has been riddled with obstacles. Earlier this week, a jury ruled in favor of OpenAI in a lawsuit filed by co-founder Elon Musk in which the billionaire asked the court to relax The conversion of OpenAI into a for-profit company and its expulsion Sam Altman, CEO of the company.
Added to this is the question of profitability, or lack thereof. For months now, the company has been involved in a major cost-cutting and revenue-maximizing effort that has included introducing ads on ChatGPT and shutting down the Sora video generator.
But despite those measures, the AI giant could still have a difficult path to profitability. Last month, the Wall Street Journal said ChatGPT’s growth had slowed down toward the end of 2025 and that the chatbot had not met internal revenue and active user goals, citing people familiar with the matter. The report also claimed that Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar was concerned about revenue growth and was unsure whether OpenAI would be able to pay for its numerous IT contracts.
Another recent report, this time from The informationclaimed that Friar and Altman were at odds over OpenAI’s IPO timeline, with the CFO reportedly believing the company was not well positioned for an IPO this year.
OpenAI is the third of three big AI-related IPOs that the market is gearing up for this year. The first was SpaceX, led by OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, whose legal dispute with Altman and the company was resolved last month in favor of OpenAI. SpaceX is expected to officially begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. The second was OpenAI’s number one rival, anthropicwhich confidentially filed for an initial public offering last week.
If they do well, the deals could have a positive effect. impact in the broader US market. But if they crash and burn, that will impact the entire economic system, in its own way.
Investors are already noticeably cautious of Silicon Valley’s justifications for the staggering amount of money being invested in AI infrastructure. Some experts have been painting disaster scenarios with a very real possibility in which demand for AI does not develop as expected in the short term and investments, which some say are propping up the entire US economy, cause the feared burst of the bubble.
Any information OpenAI eventually shares in its IPO process about its financial metrics will be an incredibly rare and valuable glimpse into whether the AI industry has the results to back up the hype.
