Open AI has filed preliminary IPO paperwork with the U.S. 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 filed 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 hope it leaks, so we’ll just announce it,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We haven’t decided on the timing yet. It may take 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 trade-offs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if it turns out to be the best option.”
Finance, valuation and why OpenAI says it needs an IPO
OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion and has raised over $180 billion in funding. Chief Financial Officer 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 hold a tender offer that would 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 a profitability timeline. The company continues to spend more than it earns while securing the computing power and infrastructure to train and run 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 the consumer and enterprise markets to Google and Anthropic. “But OpenAI doesn’t have many other options for finding the large amounts of capital needed to cover its expenses,” Elliott said.
ChatGPT It 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, just ahead of its own confidential filing with the SEC.
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 bid is successful, Anthropic and OpenAI may face pressure to accelerate their own plans, given the capital each company is trying to raise.
OpenAI officially became a public benefit corporation last year, although it was still 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 as a public company, noting that OpenAI was already measuring revenue in a manner similar to publicly traded companies that report to the SEC.
This filing comes after the conclusion of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. A federal advisory jury found that Musk took too long to bring allegations that OpenAI violated its nonprofit commitments, and a federal judge dismissed the case last month. Musk has indicated he plans to appeal.
Altman’s ‘third phase’ vision for OpenAI
Along with the IPO news, CEO Sam Altman published a separate blog post outlining what he called the third phase of OpenAI. He described the first phase as fundamental 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: develop an automated AI researcher, drive economic growth, and make personal general artificial intelligence accessible to everyone.
These comments came after Altman’s recent meeting with Senator Bernie Sanders, who proposed requiring the public to have at least a 50 percent stake in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI.
President donald trump He has also shown his support for giving the public a stake in the development of AI.
OpenAI’s internal product focus after the presentation
OpenAI has recently sharpened its focus on products. The company shut down Sora, its short-form video app, and diverted resources to its enterprise business and Codexyour 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 its confidential filing provides the option to go public sooner if market conditions are favorable.
