OpenAI has announced that it has confidentially filed for IPO with the SEC, making it the second major AI company to do so in less than two weeks. Anthropic filed for an IPO first on June 1, and now the two biggest names in AI are officially in a public market race.
The filing is confidential for now, which means the financial details most people actually want to see, including how much money OpenAI is burning through and its path to profitability, stay hidden until the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decides otherwise.
OpenAI said in a blog post that it went ahead and announced the filing publicly because it expected the news to leak anyway.
The company is currently valued at $852 billion and is reportedly targeting a $1 trillion valuation when it eventually lists. Anthropic, for its part, just hit a $965 billion post-money valuation after its latest funding round, technically making it the more valuable of the two right now, at least on paper.
OpenAI’s timing of the IPO is complicated to say the least. The company missed its own internal targets for revenue and user growth toward the end of 2025, and its CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly been skeptical about whether now is the right time to go public.
There are also serious questions about spending as OpenAI expects to burn roughly $85 billion in 2028 alone, even after doubling its revenue that year.
The company has already secured $122 billion in funding, including $3 billion from retail investors, and revised its compute spending target down from $1.4 trillion to $600 billion by 2030 after executives were publicly questioned about the original figure.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is painting a much better financial picture, telling investors it is close to its first quarterly profit. That should matter a great deal for OpenAI, because Anthropic’s IPO disclosures will establish a valuation benchmark that OpenAI will inevitably be compared against when it eventually prices its own offering.
All of this is happening in the shadow of SpaceX, which is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq this Friday at an $80 billion raise, making it the largest IPO in history.
SpaceX is also directly tied to both companies, having acquired OpenAI competitor xAI and signed a deal with Anthropic worth $15 billion a year for data center access. Whoever goes public after SpaceX will be competing for capital that may already be running thin.
OpenAI has been public-company-adjacent for a while. It started as a nonprofit in 2015, released ChatGPT in 2022, and formally completed its conversion to a for-profit public benefit corporation in late 2025. The company now has around 900 million weekly active users.
It also recently won a lawsuit brought by co-founder Elon Musk, who had tried to unwind the for-profit conversion and remove CEO Sam Altman. A jury ruled in OpenAI’s favor, though the governance questions the case raised are not going away.
READ: Elon Musk vs. OpenAI: What the Trial Has Revealed So Far
There are other headaches to contend with. Florida has sued OpenAI and Altman over claims that ChatGPT provided information to school shooters, offered guidance on self-harm, and fostered addiction in young users.
The company recently shut down its video generator Sora and introduced ads in ChatGPT as part of a cost-cutting push.
When OpenAI eventually releases its full financials at its IPO, it will be one of the clearest windows yet into whether the AI industry is actually generating the returns that justify the hundreds of billions being poured into it. That alone makes this IPO worth watching closely.
