GoKawiilOpenAI 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.
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.