- OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest public markets debuts in history.
- The confidential disclosure comes days before Elon Musk's SpaceX is set to start trading and a week after Anthropic filed confidentially with the SEC.
- The companies could end up leading the three largest IPOs on record.
OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining the party a week after Anthropic did the same and days before Elon Musk's SpaceX is set to hit the public market.
The
artificial intelligence company, which is valued at more than $850 billion, has been gearing up to go public as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. A confidential filing allows the company to submit its financials to regulators for review before they're made available to the public and prospective investors.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in April that it's
"good hygiene" for a business of OpenAI's size to "look and feel and act" like a public company, but she wouldn't comment on a specific IPO timeline. OpenAI said Monday it hasn't decided on timing.
Here's the entirety of OpenAI's post:
We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it. 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. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
OpenAI also plans to facilitate a tender offer that will allow employees to sell shares at the latest valuation, which was $852 billion post-money, and alleviate some near-term pressure for liquidity, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the details are private.
OpenAI rocketed into the mainstream following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and has since ballooned into one of the most valuable private companies in the world. ChatGPT now supports more than 900 million weekly active users, but OpenAI faces increasingly stiff competition from rivals like
Anthropic, Elon Musk's SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier this year.
SpaceX kicked off a roadshow last week. OpenAI, Anthropic and
A week ago Anthropic announced its confidential IPO filing. Shortly before that, the company closed a funding round at a
$965 billion valuation, topping OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in late March.
Depending on how SpaceX's offering is received, Anthropic and OpenAI could be rushing to beat each other out due to the massive amount of capital they're trying to raise.
OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman will be under pressure to make his case to investors, particularly around the company's financials. OpenAI has raised more than $180 billion in funding, and it is still burning through cash as it works to secure compute and build out infrastructure to train and run AI models.
In a
blog post on Monday, Altman introduced what he called "the third phase of OpenAI." The first, he wrote, was doing research towards artificial general intelligence. The second was becoming a "product company" and learning how people used its tools.
"Now we are entering the third phase," he wrote. "The economy is beginning to reshape around AI. The central question now is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it."
OpenAI has been trying to emphasize focus and discipline internally in recent months, shuttering fringe projects like the company's short-form video app Sora. The company is pouring investment into its enterprise business as well as its coding assistant product Codex, which competes directly with Anthropic's popular Claude Code offering.
Altman wrote in
a post on X in April that, "feels like codex is having a chatgpt moment."
The dueling IPO efforts by SpaceX and OpenAI come less than a month after Musk and Altman got through a bruising three-week court battle.
An advisory jury said that Musk, who first filed suit in 2024 against OpenAI and Altman,
waited too long to bring claims that they went back on their vow to keep the company a nonprofit. The federal judge immediately adopted the jury's verdict. Musk said in a post on X that the judge and jury "never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality."
<small>Source: CNBC</small>
Business
OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for mega AI debut
CNBC
June 08, 2026
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