OpenAI says it filed confidential IPO as it positions itself for AI arms race

OpenAI has filed a confidential initial public offering, the ChatGPT maker said Monday, bringing it one step closer to its official market debut. 

"We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," OpenAI said in a statement published Monday on its website. "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

Going public will allow OpenAI, which is valued at $852 billion, to inject more cash into its business as the AI arms race heats up. In March, the company said it generated $2 billion in monthly revenue.

SpaceX, which owns Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, recently filed for its own IPO, including plans to expand its AI computing power. Shares in the rocket manufacturer are expected to start trading on Friday, in what is set to be the biggest IPO ever.

Opening the floodgates

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, also filed for its own IPO last week.

"The floodgates for the IPO market are officially open with three major AI conglomerates set to go public later this year, but the race is starting to move faster as both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to file their S-1s over the coming weeks that investors will be eagerly waiting for," Wedbush Securities analysts said in a research note on Tuesday.

A confidential filing allows OpenAI to gather private feedback from regulators before submitting a public-facing document to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That filing, known as an S-1, will contain details about the AI company's revenue and profit margins. 

OpenAI's financial results are "highly anticipated given the speculation around the company burning through cash to secure compute and build out infrastructure to train and run AI models," Wedbush Securities analysts said.

OpenAI's filing comes just weeks after a judge threw out a case Musk brought against the company that could have derailed its IPO plans. Musk and Altman founded OpenAI together in 2015. 

The company launched ChatGPT in 2022, jump-starting the growth of AI. The chatbot now has 900 million weekly active users, according to OpenAI. The latest iteration is GPT-5.5, which the company launched in April.