By Angela Palumbo and Adam Clark
OpenAI announced it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering one week after competitor Anthropic announced it planned to go to market.
The ChatGPT parent said in a blog post on Monday night that it has recently submitted a confidential S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," the company said in the blog post.
OpenAI added that it hasn't decided on the timing of when it will officially go public and it "may be a while," as there are "things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company."
The announcement isn't surprising. The Wall Street Journal reported on May 20 that the company was working with bankers on a draft prospectus. But OpenAI officially revealing plans to go public solidifies that this is shaking up to be a year marked by the largest IPOs in Wall Street's history.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is expected to debut on Friday with a valuation close to $2 trillion. Fellow artificial intelligence firm Anthropic announced it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1.
Anthropic also said on May 28 that it raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion post-money. That puts its valuation above that of OpenAI, which said in March its last funding round valued it at $852 billion post-money.
OpenAI became one of the most talked about tech companies in the world after launching the increasingly popular ChatGPT AI chatbot in 2022. As of February, ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers.
CEO Sam Altman has an optimistic vision for the future of the company.
In another blog post on Monday, Altman and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said OpenAI is currently building an automated AI researcher. They expect that by March 2028, "we may have a significant fraction of our research being done by AI systems in tandem with our own researchers."
Altman and Pachocki also said they think AI should be available to everyone to use as much as they need, where and how they need it. That's not an easy goal. Growing demand for AI means there needs to be more investment into the infrastructure needed to power the tech.
There are concerns among some that OpenAI might not be able to generate enough revenue to support massive spending commitments. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 28 that OpenAI is missing its own revenue targets, falling short of user benchmarks, and is worried about meeting its future spending contracts if sales aren't able to expand at a quicker pace. OpenAI disputed the article.
It's a question that will have major consequences across the stock market. OpenAI has committed to roughly $1.4 trillion in spending and has major cloud-computing and chip deals with companies including Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom.
OpenAI said at the end of March that it was generating $2 billion in monthly revenue and it expected to soon reach one billion weekly active users -- a user goal it had originally set for the end of 2025, the Journal reported.
"The consumer AI ecosystem is a must-win for OpenAI if it is ever to justify a $1tn+ valuation, and I continue to think that this is very far from a foregone conclusion," said independent analyst Richard Windsor, who publishes the Radio Free Mobile blog. "Hence, I think this is a high-risk IPO where the market may decline to pay the price being offered."
Barron's owner News Corp. has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com and Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 09, 2026 07:21 ET (11:21 GMT)
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