The AI arms race is officially moving to Wall Street.
OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to reporting by CNBC. This puts the ChatGPT maker on a path toward going public just weeks after Anthropic made its own filing and just before SpaceX is expected to hit the public markets. It’s quite the lineup for a sector that, just a few years ago, was mostly a research experiment.
The company is valued at a staggering $852 billion post-money, making it one of the most valuable private companies on the planet. But here’s the wrinkle: OpenAI says it hasn’t decided on timing yet. The filing, in other words, is less a grand announcement and more of a strategicplaceholder. CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC back in April that it’s simply “good hygiene” for a company of their size to look and feel like a public company. That’s corporate speak for “we’re keeping our options open,” and honestly, you can’t blame them.
The IPO Domino Effect
What’s really driving this? It looks like a classic case of competitive positioning. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 about a week ago, capping off a funding round that valued the Claude maker at $965 billion, which actually tops OpenAI’s valuation. Then there’s SpaceX, which is reportedly gearing up for its own roadshow and has listed OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as “key competitors” in its filing. The irony of Musk calling out his own companies’ competition while also merging SpaceX with xAI earlier this year isn’t lost on anyone.
The timing is curious, though. OpenAI explicitly said it may be a while before it actually goes public because there are things they want to do that are easier as a private company. So why file now? Perhaps it’s about locking in the option to move quickly depending on how SpaceX’s offering performs. If the market responds well to SpaceX, you can bet OpenAI and Anthropic will speed up their timelines. If it stumbles, they can wait.
Altman Makes His Case
CEO Sam Altman has been framing this as a new chapter. In a blog post on Monday, he laid out what he called “the third phase of OpenAI.” Phase one was research toward artificial general intelligence. Phase two was becoming a product company and learning how people used ChatGPT, which now boasts over 900 million weekly active users. Now, he says, the economy is beginning to reshape around AI, and the central question is how to make advanced AI “abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it.”
That’s a compelling vision, but investors will want to see the numbers. OpenAI has raised over $180 billion in funding and continues to burn through cash as it builds out the compute infrastructure needed to train and run these models. Altman will need to convince the market that the path to profitability is clearer than it’s been so far.
The company is also trying to show it’s tightening up internally. They’ve shut down fringe projects like the short-form video app Sora and are pouring investment into enterprise offerings and Codex, their coding assistant that Altman himself called “having a chatgpt moment” in an April post on X.
All of this is happening just weeks after Elon Musk and Altman wrapped up a bruising three-week court battle over whether OpenAI betrayed its nonprofit origins. A jury ruled that Musk waited too long to bring his claims. The legal drama may be over for now, but the competitive war is just heating up.
Whether this IPO rush is smart positioning or a sign that these companies are feeling pressure to validate their sky-high valuations in the public market remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure: the AI sector is about to get a lot more interesting on Wall Street.
