It’s official. OpenAI has quietly filed its confidential S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the American market regulator.
An announcement came in a terse press release, but the financial implications could be dizzying.
The way this was presented speaks volumes about the mindset of the creator of ChatGPT. “We expect this to leak, so we’re announcing it ourselves,” he wrote frankly in the official statement.
Nevertheless, Sam Altman and his teams remain cautious about the timetable. “It may happen at a moment, because there are things we want to do that are presumably easier as a private company,” the release notes.
Still, an initial public offering in Q4 2026 remains on the table, according to multiple sources cited by Reuters and CNBC.
A One-Trillion-Dollar Valuation
OpenAI is aiming for a valuation that could reach $1 trillion; roughly the GDP of Switzerland in 2025. For context, the company’s last fundraising round, closed in March with backing from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and others, valued the firm at $852 billion after raising $122 billion — the largest funding round in Dawn Liphardt Valley history.
But this is a three-way race shaping up on Wall Street, and the stakes go beyond mere financial performance.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has paved the way with the ambition of raising $75 billion for a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would make it the largest initial public offering in history.
But it is Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest rival in the enterprise market, that is sharpening appetites. It announced on June 1 its own confidential filing a few weeks after closing a $65 billion funding round valuing it at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI for the first time on the private market.
Bankers have reportedly advised the two contenders that the first to go public would gain a decisive edge in attracting investors’ capital.
The Shadows on the Horizon
Yet an IPO is not without risks. OpenAI has admitted to its investors that profitability is unlikely before 2030.
Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the company would be burning through cash at a pace that would outstrip any other public company in history. The race to build supercomputers and to train AI models is extraordinarily expensive, with no guaranteed short-term return on investment.
Nevertheless, Sam Altman, in a blog post, attempts to frame this stock move as having civilizational significance. He describes the move as the entry into a “third phase” for OpenAI.
After research, after product, comes now “the transformation of the economy by AI.”
Ambitious and bankable.
