OpenAI, Creator of ChatGPT, Quietly Plans IPO
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - OpenAI has quietly filed documents for an initial public offering (IPO) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The move comes a week after its rival, Anthropic, filed a similar IPO and just days before Elon Musk’s SpaceX is scheduled to list on the stock exchange.
The artificial intelligence (AI) company, which has a valuation of more than US$850 billion, is preparing to list on the stock market as early as the fourth quarter of this year. Confidential filing allows the company to submit financial reports to the regulator for review before they are published to investors and the public.
OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Sarah Friar previously said in April that a company of OpenAI’s class needs to look, behave, and operate like a public company. However, she did not provide certainty regarding the IPO schedule. OpenAI on Monday also emphasised that the company has not determined the timing of the IPO.
In its statement, OpenAI revealed it had confidentially submitted an S-1 filing to the SEC.
“We recently filed a confidential S-1. We expect this information to leak, so we decided to announce it. We haven’t decided on the timing, it may still be quite some time as there are some things that are easier for us to do as a private company. However, this is a complex set of considerations, and this step gives us the option to list on the stock exchange more quickly if that becomes the best option,” OpenAI wrote, as quoted by CNBC International, Tuesday (9/6/2026).
Additionally, OpenAI plans to facilitate a tender offer allowing employees to sell their shares based on the company’s latest valuation, which reached US$852 billion after funding. This step aims to reduce short-term liquidity pressure.
According to sources familiar with the plan, OpenAI has also engaged several major investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to prepare the IPO process. Both banks are also listed as the main underwriters in SpaceX’s IPO documents.
OpenAI surged into the mainstream after launching the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. Currently, ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users. However, competition in the AI industry is increasingly tightening with the presence of major players such as Anthropic, Google, and SpaceX, which merged with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year.
Last week, SpaceX began a roadshow to prospective investors. In its IPO documents, SpaceX even listed OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as some of its main competitors in the AI field.
Meanwhile, Anthropic announced its confidential IPO filing a week ago. Prior to that, the company successfully closed a new funding round with a valuation reaching US$965 billion, surpassing OpenAI, which had a valuation of US$852 billion at the end of March.
The race to the stock market is expected to intensify, given the enormous capital requirements to develop AI technology. OpenAI itself has raised more than US$180 billion in funding but is still burning large amounts of cash to acquire computing capacity and build infrastructure for training and operating AI models.
In recent months, OpenAI has also tightened its business focus by halting a number of non-priority projects such as the short video application Sora. The company is now investing heavily in its corporate business and the Codex programming assistant product, which competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
OpenAI and SpaceX’s IPO plans emerged less than a month after Altman and Elon Musk resolved a three-week legal dispute. Musk, who sued OpenAI and Altman since 2024, accused both of reneging on a promise to maintain OpenAI as a non-profit organisation.