OpenAI has filed its confidential S-1, the first official step toward a blockbuster IPO.
The ChatGPT developer announced the filing on Monday in a short, blunt blog post. The confidential S-1 draft gives the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission time to review OpenAI’s plans for an eventual public listing — though the post made it sound like that could be a ways out.
“We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” OpenAI’s post said. “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.”
It continued: “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’s confidential S-1 announcement arrives exactly a week after Anthropic’s filing, part of a long-running rivalry between the two frontier AI labs. Each of the IPOs is expected to value its company at more than $1 trillion, 10 times Facebook’s valuation at its landmark 2012 public listing.
OpenAI’s last funding round in March valued the company at $852 billion. Anthropic’s last round, raised in May, placed its valuation at $965 billion.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, downplayed the idea that the rivals are racing to IPO first after Anthropic’s filing on June 1.
“I think there is a race to deliver the best technology and build the best business,” Altman said on CNBC. “But, you know, going public is a financing event, and I don’t think that’s one that we’re focused on the timing of. We’ll do it when we think it makes sense.”
Confidential S-1 documents typically arrive about 6 to 9 months before a company goes public, though the timeline varies.
An OpenAI IPO would cap off one of the most frenzied eras in tech history. Since the company released ChatGPT in 2022, trillions of dollars of investment have poured into AI-focused software and physical infrastructure. Altman is now one of America’s most famous businessmen, the face of a powerful but divisive technology.
An IPO would bring liquidity to employees and raise billions of dollars in funding for OpenAI’s compute buildout, but it would also entail risks. The company would have to publicly disclose its revenue, expenses, and profits for the first time and, after the listing, face the day-to-day whims of the stock market.
Further complicating OpenAI’s IPO, the company is in discussions with the Trump Administration about the government taking a stake in the company.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
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