- Lead. OpenAI filed a confidential draft S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8, the company confirmed, taking the first formal step toward a public listing at a current private valuation of $852 billion.
- Fact. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the process; CFO Sarah Friar has noted that the valuation would rank OpenAI among the 15 largest companies in the S&P 500 if it listed today, though an exact IPO timeline has not been set.
- Stake. OpenAI’s filing lands within days of rival Anthropic’s own confidential S-1 and hours ahead of SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut—compressing what investment bankers had expected to be a staggered AI IPO pipeline into an unusually tight window that will test public-market appetite for loss-making AI companies.
The filing and what it signals
OpenAI confirmed the submission on Monday, June 8, adding pointedly: “We expect it to leak, so we’re just announcing it.” The company emphasised that going public “may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” but that the filing preserves optionality for an earlier listing if market conditions warrant, according to Fortune. A confidential S-1 allows a company to disclose sensitive financial information to regulators before choosing whether to make it public—standard practice for high-profile technology listings.
The filing follows OpenAI’s most recent funding round, which closed at a $122 billion raise and set the company’s valuation at $852 billion. ChatGPT now serves more than 900 million weekly active users globally, making it one of the fastest-adopted consumer applications in history. Yet the company is not profitable, and internal projections cited in prior reporting indicate a $14 billion net loss in 2026, with profitability not expected before 2029.
The competitive backdrop
Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 one week earlier at a $965 billion valuation, and SpaceX is pricing its Nasdaq debut on June 11. Investment bankers advising all three companies have described the clustering as a race to set sector pricing norms: the first to establish a credible public-market multiple for AI infrastructure companies will implicitly anchor valuations for those that follow.
OpenAI’s position is complicated by its unusual corporate history. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, the company reorganised into a public benefit corporation last year after successfully defending that restructuring against a legal challenge by Elon Musk. The transition matters for a public listing because it defines the governance rights that equity investors will receive—a question the S-1, when made public, will have to address in detail.
What the IPO would fund
Sam Altman has described three central goals for the company: building automated AI researchers capable of self-directed scientific work, using that capability to accelerate broad economic growth, and providing “everyone on Earth a personal AGI.” Achieving any of those ambitions requires semiconductor and data-centre spending that dwarfs current revenue—the company has disclosed plans for unprecedented capital expenditure through 2030. Public markets offer a route to that capital that private funding rounds, however large, cannot match sustainably. Whether institutional investors will accept the combination of visionary framing and near-decade losses-before-profit will be the central question when the S-1 becomes public.