OpenAI confidentially files for IPO, prepping Wall Street for AI debut

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.

The company has been working with banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the filing, as CNBC previously reported. They’re the two firms listed at the top of SpaceX’s filing.

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, Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier this year.

SpaceX kicked off a roadshow last week. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are all named as some of SpaceX’s “key competitors” in AI, according to the filing.

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.”

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