OpenAI has filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post, according to both Wired and TechCrunch. The filing comes just over a week after its main rival Anthropic also filed to go public, according to TechCrunch.
According to Wired, OpenAI “recently submitted a confidential S-1” but has not decided on timing yet. The company stated it expected the filing to leak, prompting the public announcement. “It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI wrote, adding that “it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
TechCrunch reports that OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion post-money. According to Wired, the company privately raised $122 billion in March.
Wired notes this makes OpenAI “the third company to file for what could be a trillion-dollar IPO this year,” with SpaceX also expected to go public at a $1.75 trillion valuation, according to TechCrunch. Wired indicates that going public “could also boost employee morale and customer confidence as OpenAI tries to regain its position as the clear front-runner in frontier AI.”
OpenAI did not specify how much it plans to raise, according to Wired, and declined to comment further.