OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (pictured) speaks with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event in Tokyo on February 3, 2025.
Tomohiro Osumi | Getty Images News | Getty Images
OpenAI secretly filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, joining a week after Anthropic did the same and days before Elon Musk’s SpaceX hit the public market.
The artificial intelligence company, which has a market capitalization of more than $850 billion, is preparing to go public as early as the fourth quarter of this year. The company can submit confidential documents to regulators for review before disclosing its financials to the public or investors.
Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, told CNBC in April that it’s “hygienic” for a company of OpenAI’s size to “look, feel and act” like a publicly traded company, but declined to comment on a specific IPO schedule. OpenAI said Monday that it has not yet determined the timing.
The full text of OpenAI’s post is below.
We recently filed a confidential S-1. I’m just announcing it because I’m expecting leaks. The timing has not yet been determined. As a private company, there are things we would like to do more easily, so it may take some time. However, this comes with complex trade-offs, giving you the option to go public sooner if that is ultimately what is best for you.
OpenAI also plans to facilitate a tender offer that would allow employees to sell stock for $852 billion post-money, easing short-term liquidity pressures, said a person familiar with the plan who requested anonymity because the details are private.
As CNBC previously reported, the company is working with banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the application. The two companies are listed at the top of SpaceX’s filing.
OpenAI exploded into the mainstream following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and has since grown to become one of the most valuable private companies in the world. ChatGPT currently supports more than 900 million weekly active users, but OpenAI faces increasing competition from rivals such as Anthropic. google And Elon Musk’s SpaceX merged with xAI earlier this year.
SpaceX began its roadshow last week. OpenAI, Anthropic, google All are listed as some of SpaceX’s “key competitors” in the AI space, according to the filing.
A week ago, Anthropic announced a secret IPO filing. Just before that, the company completed a funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in late March.
Depending on how SpaceX’s proposal is received, Anthropic and OpenAI could try to outdo each other in a hurry for the huge amount of funding they are looking to raise.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be under pressure to make his case to investors, especially on the company’s financials. OpenAI has raised more than $180 billion in funding to date and is still running out of money as it works to secure compute and build infrastructure to train and run its AI models.
In a blog post on Monday, Altman introduced what he called “Phase 3 of OpenAI.” The first was conducting research toward artificial general intelligence, he wrote. The second was to become a “product company” and learn how people use the tools.
“Now we are entering stage three,” he wrote. “The economy is starting to be restructured around AI. The central question now is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and simple enough for all individuals and organizations to benefit from it.”
OpenAI has been emphasizing focus and discipline internally in recent months, shutting down peripheral projects like its short-form video app Sora. The company is pouring investment into its enterprise business as well as Codex, a coding assistant product that directly competes with Anthropic’s popular product Claude Code.
“It feels like the Codex is having a chat moment,” Altman wrote in an April post to X.
The intense IPO effort by SpaceX and OpenAI comes less than a month after Musk and Altman weathered a three-week legal battle.
The advisory jury said Musk, who first filed suit against OpenAI and Altman in 2024, waited too long to bring forward claims that he had reneged on a pledge to keep the company a nonprofit organization. A federal judge immediately adopted the jury’s verdict. Musk said in a post on
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