Following Anthropic, OpenAI files confidentially for IPO

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company said Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.

OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. The company didn’t list the number of shares or set a price.

The filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for the public markets, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX also poised to make its debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

OpenAI is racing to IPO even as it recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, per The Wall Street Journal. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar reportedly expressed concern that OpenAI wouldn’t be able to support its massive spending on data centers. And the burn does appear to be massive. 

In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history — $3B of which came directly from retail investors via bank channels. But the firm is poised to spend the size of that round on computing power for AI research in 2028, and expects to burn $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the year prior, per The Wall Street Journal. The company does not expect positive cash flow until 2030.

SpaceX’s AI spend, while not as large, provides another example of how the cost to train large language models can exceed the revenue companies bring in from those models.

Anthropic, on the other hand, has provided investors with a much rosier picture of its financials, saying that it is close to achieving its first quarterly profit. That said, with a recent $65 billion funding round and another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially on its way, Anthropic’s burn rate isn’t exactly modest. 

The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to start its preparation for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared stock pricing or how much it hopes to raise yet. That said, the secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay. 

Anthropic recently surged to a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassing OpenAI, which was recorded at around $880 billion in April. 

David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC, oversees the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index, which tracks the largest public and private companies in the U.S. He said Anthropic’s rate of appreciation far exceeds OpenAI this year — 123% year-to-date versus OpenAI’s 11.3%. That said, despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI isn’t seeing a lack of secondary interest. 

“From a secondary investor standpoint, OpenAI had already grown into a significant portion of its valuation,” David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC, who oversees the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index which tracks the largest public and private companies in the U.S., told TechCrunch. “We haven’t seen OpenAI crater or anything close, and valuation is still enormously successful, according to the index.”

He added that OpenAI’s stock in the secondary market “experienced a slight pop over the last few days, indicating investors may be pricing both as the ‘dual winners’ of the broader LLM race.”

But the race to get to the public markets first is a real concern. Experts say whoever makes their debut first will likely nab more of what is becoming increasingly scarce capital for AI companies, much of which will have already gone to SpaceX which is expected to IPO first among the three.

Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will set a valuation comp that constrains how OpenAI can price its own offering when it files, according to a recent PitchBook report that viewed OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals.

OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, disrupted the world of AI when it released ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of large language model advancements across the industry.

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

The IPO comes after significant internal struggles within the company. In 2022, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman due to a lack of transparency from and trust in the CEO to stick to the firm’s mission of benefitting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and those who were involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, departed shortly after. 

More recently, OpenAI has been involved in several lawsuits, including a recent one from the state of Florida accusing the company and Altman of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm, and addicting young users. Florida’s complaint adds to the litany of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers following user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events.

Last month, OpenAI went to trial after Elon Musk, one of its co-founders and competitors, sued the company and Altman alleging they violated a promise to keep the company a nonprofit. The case was ultimately tossed out after a jury and judge found Musk was beyond the statute of limitations when he filed the case in 2024. 

OpenAI has also faced criticism after its president Greg Brockman and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI PAC dedicated to thwarting local politicians advocating for AI regulation. They made similar contributions to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has tried to distance itself from its president’s “personal” donations, claiming that none of the funds were provided on behalf of the company.