The AI industry just got a bit more crowded at the top. OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC, making it the third major player in the artificial intelligence space to go public in rapid succession. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 just a week ago, and SpaceX is expected to hit the public markets any day now.
This isn’t a coincidence. The timing tells us something important about what’s happening behind the scenes.
According to CNBC reporting, OpenAI is valued at more than $850 billion and has been preparing to go public as soon as Q4 of this year. The company’s CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC back in April that it’s simply “good hygiene” for a business of OpenAI’s size to start acting like a public company. That’s corporate speak for “we’re definitely thinking about this,” and now we have confirmation that the paperwork is actually in motion.
Here’s the interesting part: OpenAI says it hasn’t decided on timing yet. In a statement, the company acknowledged it submitted a confidential S-1 but suggested it may take a while because there are things easier to do as a private company. That’s a remarkably candid admission from a company allegedly racing toward an IPO. It suggests the filing is as much about keeping options open as it is about actually going public in the near term.
The company is also planning a tender offer that would let employees sell shares at their latest valuation of $852 billion. That’s a smart move to address some of the liquidity pressure that’s been building as the company burns through cash faster than ever. Training and running AI models isn’t cheap, and OpenAI has raised over $180 billion in funding. This tender offer gives employees a payout without forcing the company through the full IPO rigamarole just yet.
The competitive context here is hard to ignore. Anthropic closed a funding round at $965 billion valuation last month, topping OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation from late March. SpaceX, which recently merged with xAI, is also pointing to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as key competitors in its filing. These companies aren’t just building AI in parallel. They’re now racing to see who can capture public market capital first.
Sam Altman framed this as the “third phase” of OpenAI in a blog post on Monday. The first phase was pure research toward artificial general intelligence. The second was becoming a product company and learning how people use tools like ChatGPT, which now boasts over 900 million weekly active users. Now, Altman says, the economy is beginning to reshape around AI, and the central question is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, and easy enough for everyone to benefit from.
That’s a bold vision, but the financial reality is messier. The company has been shutting down fringe projects like its short-form video app Sora while pouring investment into enterprise offerings and its coding assistant product Codex. Altman himself posted on X in April that “feels like codex is having a chatgpt moment,” suggesting he’s betting big on that product as the next growth driver.
All of this is happening just weeks after Elon Musk and Altman wrapped up a bruising three-week court battle. A federal jury ruled that Musk waited too long to bring his claims about OpenAI’s nonprofit origins, but the legal drama clearly left scars on both sides.
So what’s really going on here? My take: these IPO filings are less about needing capital immediately and more about locking in competitive positioning before the market shifts. When SpaceX goes public, it will absorb a significant chunk of the institutional appetite for high-growth tech bets. By getting their filings in now, Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially reserving their place in the queue for when investor attention turns back to pure AI plays.
The real question isn’t whether these companies can go public. It’s whether they can deliver on promises that justify valuations north of $800 billion while the industry keeps evolving at breakneck speed. The filing is the easy part. What comes after will determine who actually wins this race.
You’ll want to keep an eye on how SpaceX’s offering performs when it finally launches. That will set the tone for everything else that follows.
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