OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has taken its first formal step towards floating on the stock market, just a week after its closest competitor, Anthropic, did the same.
The firm announced the move on Monday afternoon in a post on X, confirming that it had quietly begun the process required to sell shares to the public. “We recently submitted a confidential S-1,” it wrote, referring to the document a company must file with American regulators ahead of an initial public offering. OpenAI was careful, however, to stress that nothing had been settled. “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,” it said, adding that the filing was “a complicated set of tradeoffs” that simply gave it “the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
A confidential filing of this kind allows a company to begin discussions with regulators without immediately laying bare its revenues, profit margins or risks. According to reporting by NBC News, OpenAI’s submission follows that of Anthropic and comes only days before the rocket company SpaceX is expected to make its own market debut.
The scale of the figures involved is considerable. In March, OpenAI’s valuation climbed to $852 billion after it raised a further $122 billion to fund its expansion. Much of that money is being poured into developing more advanced artificial intelligence systems, as well as the vast data centres and cloud computing power needed to run them. Anthropic, which filed for its own public offering on 1 June, was valued at $952 billion in its most recent funding round.
Whenever the two AI firms eventually begin trading, they are likely to follow in the wake of SpaceX, whose offering has been valued at more than a trillion dollars and is expected on Friday. Elon Musk’s company is itself deeply involved in artificial intelligence through its xAI venture, underlining how closely the sector now sits at the heart of the markets.
OpenAI became a household name almost overnight. ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, lets people use the company’s AI models free of charge and has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times since. Yet the years of rapid growth have also brought scrutiny. Only last month, the company emerged from a bitter legal dispute with Musk, who had sued as it sought to move away from its origins as a non-profit organisation.
It has also faced accusations that ChatGPT has caused harm to some of its younger users — claims the company has rejected. In response to one recent lawsuit, OpenAI said it was not to blame.
Internally, the mood appears more cautious than the headline valuations might suggest. Executives have acknowledged the need to cut back on what they have called “side quests” and to avoid letting the company “miss this moment”, according to the Wall Street Journal. The same paper has reported that OpenAI has fallen short of several internal revenue and user targets, the result of intensifying competition from Anthropic and from Google, whose Gemini model is winning a growing following.
