GoKawiilChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.
OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn’t shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak.
“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,” the company wrote. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
Around the same time, and in a separate blog post, OpenAI published a sweeping philosophical statement about its mission, its vision for AGI, and its belief that AI should benefit all of humanity — the kind of forward-looking communication that companies entering a quiet period have historically been careful to avoid. That OpenAI appears comfortable publishing it so close to a confidential filing says something — not necessarily about the its own legal judgment but about the regulatory environment it’s operating in. The SEC under the Trump administration has taken a markedly more hands-off posture toward tech and AI companies than it did under previous administrations, and OpenAI may simply be reading the room.
Whatever the regulatory questions, the filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for the public markets. SpaceX is also expected to make its debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation, meaning three of the most closely watched companies in tech could all go public within months of each other — a concentration of high-stakes offerings the markets haven’t seen since the dot-com boom.
OpenAI is racing to IPO even as it recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, per The Wall Street Journal. Its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to support its massive data center spending. And the burn does appear to be massive.
In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history — $3 billion of which came directly from retail investors via bank channels. But the firm expects to spend roughly that same amount on computing power for AI research alone in 2028, and projects burning $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the year prior, per The Wall Street Journal. Put another way, OpenAI is asking public market investors to buy into a business that, by its own projections, won’t generate more cash than it spends for at least four more years.
SpaceX offers a parallel data point. Its AI spending, while not as massive, illustrates how the cost to train large language models can exceed the revenue those models generate — a structural challenge the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors will have to price.
Anthropic, on the other hand, has provided investors a much rosier picture of its financials, saying that it is close to achieving its first quarterly profit. Even so, with a recent $65 billion funding round and another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially on its way, Anthropic’s burn rate isn’t exactly modest.
The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to start its preparation for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared stock pricing or how much it hopes to raise yet. That said, the secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay.
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