Following Anthropic, OpenAI is secretly filing for an IPO

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in Blog post. The filing comes just over a week after its main competitor, Anthropic, It has also been submitted to be released to the publicWhich led to the intensification of the race between the two artificial intelligence companies.

OpenAI, which was last rated at $852 billion post-moneyhas filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding a proposed initial public offering. The company did not mention the number of shares or specify a price.

The filing is the latest sign that 2026 will be a successful year for the public markets. SpaceX is also expected to do so Make her debut At a valuation of $1.75 trillion, it means three of the most closely watched companies in tech could go public within months of each other — a concentration of high-risk offerings the markets haven’t seen in a generation.

OpenAI is racing to go public even after recently failing to meet its own goals for new users and revenue, Per The Wall Street Journal. Its CFO, Sarah Friar, has reportedly raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to support its massive data center spending. The burning appears 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 banking channels. But the company expects to spend about the same amount on computing power for AI research alone in 2028, and the projects are burning $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the previous year. Per The Wall Street Journal. For context: OpenAI is asking public market investors to buy into a company that, according to its own projections, won’t generate more money than it spends for at least another four years.

SpaceX offers a parallel data point. that it Spending on artificial intelligenceWhile it’s not huge, it shows how the cost of training large language models can exceed the revenues generated by those models — a structural challenge that the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors will have to price in.

On the other hand, Anthropic presented investors with a rosier picture of its financials, saying it was close to… Achieving its first quarterly profits. Even so, with the latter A $65 billion financing round And another $36 billion of debt allocated to chips Anthropic’s burn rate on his way likely isn’t exactly modest.

A confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to begin preparing it for a public offering without publicly revealing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared share prices or how much it hopes to raise yet. However, secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay.

Anthropic It recently rose to $1 trillion The valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassed OpenAI, which was clocked at around $880 billion in April.

Anthropic’s appreciation rate is far outpacing OpenAI this year — 123% year-to-date versus 11.3% for OpenAI, said David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC and overseer of the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index, which tracks the largest public and private companies in the United States. However, despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI is seeing no shortage of secondary interest.

“From a secondary investor perspective, OpenAI has really grown into a big part of its valuation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch. “We haven’t seen an OpenAI pit or anything close, and the evaluation remains very successful, according to the indicator.”

He added that OpenAI’s shares on the secondary market “have seen a slight rally over the past few days, suggesting that investors may be pricing both as ‘double winners’ in the broader LLM race.”

But the race to get to public markets first is a real concern. Experts say Whoever debuts will likely seize more capital that has become increasingly scarce for AI companies, much of which will have already gone to SpaceX and which is expected to go public in an initial public offering among the three companies.

Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will identify valuation firms restricting how OpenAI prices its own offerings when it files, according to a recent PitchBook report that deemed OpenAI overvalued compared to its fundamentals.

OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab, revolutionized the world of AI when it released ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of major advances in language models across the industry.

While OpenAI has expanded its products to accommodate enterprise and government customers, the company has a strong reputation for being more consumer-focused than its competitor Anthropic. The company has built real scale, with approx 900 million weekly active users.

The IPO comes after major internal conflicts within the company. In 2022, the OpenAI Board of Directors Deposed Altman Due to a lack of transparency and trust from the CEO to commit to the company’s mission of benefiting all of humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and those involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, left soon after.

Recently, OpenAI has been involved in several lawsuits, including the recent lawsuit from… Florida State The company and Altman are accused of harming children by providing information to school shooters, providing advice on self-harm, and addicting young users. Florida complaint adds to A series of lawsuits Against OpenAI and other chatbot makers that follow user fantasies, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events.

Last month, OpenAI went to court after Elon Musk, one of its founders and a competitor, sued the company and Altman, claiming they violated a promise to keep the company a nonprofit. It was the case It was eventually brought up After a jury and judge found that Musk exceeded the statute of limitations when he filed the case in 2024.

OpenAI also faced criticism after its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife donated $12.5 million to… Leading the futurea pro-AI PAC dedicated to thwarting local politicians who advocate for AI regulation. They have made similar contributions to MAGA Inc, the major pro-Trump political action committee. OpenAI has tried to do this Same distance From its president’s “personal” donations, claiming that none of the funds were provided on behalf of the company.