OpenAI has confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, moving the artificial intelligence company closer to a long-anticipated Wall Street debut.
The filing comes as the market for large AI companies heats up. Anthropic submitted its own confidential IPO filing about a week earlier, and SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is preparing to begin trading in the public market. The three companies could end up producing some of the largest public offerings on record.
A confidential filing lets a company share financial information with regulators before those details become public. OpenAI said it has not settled on a timetable for an IPO, even though it had been working toward a possible listing as early as later this year.
OpenAI is currently valued at more than $850 billion, according to the source material, and the company has also been preparing a tender offer that would allow employees to sell shares at the latest valuation. That move would provide some liquidity for staff while the company continues to scale.
Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said in April that it makes sense for a company of OpenAI’s size to operate with the discipline of a public company, though she did not give a specific IPO timeline. In its own statement on Monday, OpenAI said the timing remains undecided and that some projects may be easier to pursue while the company is still private.
The company also said the filing gives it flexibility. If public markets become the best option sooner, the confidential submission keeps that path open.
OpenAI has worked with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the process, according to CNBC reporting cited in the source material. Those banks are also listed among the lead firms in SpaceX’s filing.
OpenAI rose to global prominence after launching ChatGPT in 2022. Since then, the company has grown into one of the world’s most valuable private businesses. ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users, according to the source material.
Even with that scale, OpenAI faces intensifying competition from Anthropic, Google and SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier this year. SpaceX’s filing identifies OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as key competitors in AI.
The company’s capital needs remain significant. OpenAI has raised more than $180 billion and is still spending heavily on compute and infrastructure needed to train and run its models. That spending backdrop helps explain why a public listing is being closely watched by investors.
In a blog post on Monday, CEO Sam Altman described what he called the company’s third phase. He said OpenAI first focused on research aimed at artificial general intelligence, then became a product company. Now, he wrote, the broader economy is being reshaped by AI, and the challenge is to make advanced systems abundant, affordable, safe and easy to use.
Altman has also pushed the company to narrow its focus in recent months, shutting down some side projects, including a short-form video app called Sora. OpenAI is putting more resources into its enterprise business and into Codex, its coding assistant, which competes with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
The filing also comes amid a fresh backdrop of rivalry between Altman and Musk. The two recently wrapped up a court fight over Musk’s claims that OpenAI strayed from its original nonprofit mission. An advisory jury ruled that Musk waited too long to bring the case, and the judge adopted that decision.
With OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX all moving closer to public markets, the AI sector may be heading toward one of the busiest IPO stretches in years.