OpenAI Files Confidentially for IPO, Following Anthropic’s Move Toward Public Markets

OpenAI has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, giving the ChatGPT maker the option to pursue a public listing as frontier AI companies begin positioning for access to public capital markets.

The company announced the filing on Monday, saying it expected the submission to leak and decided to disclose it publicly. OpenAI said it has not decided on the timing of a potential initial public offering and cautioned that a listing “may be a while” because some steps may be easier to complete while it remains private.

“But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,” the company said.

The filing came one week after Anthropic, the developer of Claude and one of OpenAI’s closest rivals, said it had also confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC for a proposed IPO. Anthropic said its listing would depend on market conditions and other factors after the SEC completes its review.

The back-to-back filings mark a notable shift for the AI sector, where the most closely watched private companies have relied on large private funding rounds from venture investors, sovereign wealth funds and strategic backers to finance increasingly expensive model development and compute infrastructure.

OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round in March at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, one of the largest private financing rounds in technology. Anthropic, meanwhile, has also raised aggressively as demand for its Claude models has grown among enterprise and developer customers.

For OpenAI, a public listing would represent another step in its transition from a research lab founded as a nonprofit in 2015 into one of the world’s most valuable technology companies. The company completed a recapitalization last year that simplified its structure, with the OpenAI Foundation retaining control of the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC.

That structure remains central to OpenAI’s investment story. The company has said the public benefit corporation is designed to pursue commercial growth while remaining aligned with its stated mission, while the nonprofit retains special governance rights over the for-profit entity.

A confidential S-1 does not commit a company to an IPO. It allows the SEC to review the draft registration statement before the company makes its financials and risk disclosures public. For OpenAI, the move gives management flexibility to test the path toward a listing while continuing to navigate questions around capital needs, corporate governance, competition and the cost of building frontier AI systems.

The timing also underscores how quickly the AI market is maturing. OpenAI and Anthropic have become two of the defining companies in generative AI, but both face the same financial pressure: training and serving advanced models requires massive spending on chips, data centers, power and cloud capacity.

That capital intensity has increasingly blurred the line between software companies and infrastructure companies. A public listing could give OpenAI a broader funding base and provide liquidity for employees and early investors, but it would also subject the company to quarterly financial disclosures and closer scrutiny over revenue growth, losses, safety commitments and long-term infrastructure obligations.

OpenAI’s statement suggested the company is keeping those tradeoffs open rather than signaling an imminent market debut. The filing gives it a path to move faster if conditions are favorable, while preserving the option to stay private as it continues to expand its products, partnerships and infrastructure footprint.