OpenAI has confidentially filed draft paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, the company confirmed, taking its first formal step toward a stock-market debut that could rank among the largest in history. The maker of ChatGPT submitted a confidential draft S-1, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan leading the offering.
The disclosure, confirmed publicly on Monday, sets the stage for a listing analysts expect to value OpenAI well above $1 trillion. The company was valued at about $852 billion in a late-March funding round, and a public offering would test whether investors will pay a steep premium for the most prominent name in consumer artificial intelligence.
OpenAI cautioned that it has not settled on timing. A confidential filing lets a company prepare for a listing while keeping its financials private until closer to a debut, and OpenAI said it wanted the flexibility to go public sooner if conditions warrant while preserving the option to stay private longer. Some reports point to a potential listing as early as September.
The filing lands in the middle of a rush of marquee technology offerings. It came roughly a week after rival Anthropic filed confidentially at a $965 billion valuation, and just days before Elon Musk's SpaceX is due to begin trading on the Nasdaq. Together the three represent the most valuable cluster of private companies ever to approach the public markets in such a short window.
OpenAI's move also follows its restructuring into a public-benefit corporation, a step that cleared a path to raising capital from public investors while retaining its stated mission. The company has been spending heavily on computing capacity, striking multibillion-dollar agreements for chips and data-centre power to keep pace with surging demand for its models.
An IPO would mark a turning point for a company that began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 and has since become the commercial face of the AI boom, with hundreds of millions of weekly users of ChatGPT. It would also force OpenAI to open its books to the scrutiny that comes with public ownership, including detailed disclosure of revenue, losses and the cost of the infrastructure underpinning its products.
The timing of any debut now rests with regulators and markets. The SEC review of a confidential filing can take months, and OpenAI gave no firm date, leaving open whether it will move ahead of, alongside, or behind the other AI and space giants now crowding the IPO pipeline.