OpenAI has confidentially filed a draft registration statement (Form S-1) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, marking the formal beginning of its long-anticipated initial public offering process. The filing is confidential, meaning the company has started regulatory review without disclosing financial statements, pricing details, and share structure to the public. This approach is standard for large late-stage private companies because it allows them to refine valuation strategy and disclosure language while keeping sensitive revenue, cost, and margin data hidden until closer to listing.
The move places OpenAI directly in the middle of a fast-developing AI IPO race, coming roughly a week after Anthropic submitted its own confidential S-1 filing on June 1. Both companies are now expected to move through SEC review in parallel, with reports suggesting potential public market debuts in the second half of 2026, possibly around September to November 2026 depending on market conditions and regulatory approval. Notably, Anthropic’s filing came shortly after a major funding round that valued it at about $965 billion, putting it slightly ahead of OpenAI in private-market valuation rankings.
Meanwhile, the Sam Altman-led firm recently closed a $122 billion funding round in early 2026, which valued OpenAI at around $852 billion post-money. This followed a series of earlier mega-rounds, including a $40 billion raise in 2025 at a $300 billion valuation. On the revenue side, OpenAI has scaled from early monetization into a major high-growth software business within just a few years of launching ChatGPT. The company reportedly reached about $10 billion in annualized recurring revenue in mid-2025, which later climbed to around $12-13 billion annualized, before surpassing $20 billion in annualized revenue by 2025. Even user adoption has grown at a similar pace, with ChatGPT reaching over 900 million weekly active users in 2026.
A key factor in the IPO race is the high cost of developing and operating advanced AI systems. Both OpenAI and Anthropic spend heavily on compute infrastructure, particularly high-end GPUs, cloud contracts, and data-center expansion. This creates a business model where revenue is growing rapidly, but expenses tied to training and running large models are also extremely high, making profitability a longer-term question.
The IPO wave is not limited to these two firms. The broader market context includes other large-scale private tech listings, including SpaceX’s expected public offering around the same period, which together signal one of the largest concentration of mega-IPOs in recent years.