“We expected this to be leaked so we are announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement. “We haven’t decided on timing yet; it may take some time because there are some things we want to do that might be easier as a private company. But it’s a complex set of tradeoffs and it gives us the option of going public sooner if that’s best.”
The filing is confidential until now, meaning that until the SEC makes it public, people won’t be able to see the highly coveted details of OpenAI’s financial condition and its unclear path to profitability. Companies prefer confidential filings because it helps them get regulatory approval before presenting financial information for public scrutiny, a wise move given that OpenAI already has a critical eye.
OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion, and reports claim executives are targeting a stock market valuation of up to $1 trillion
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit AI lab. Ten years later, in late 2025, the former nonprofit finalized its recapitalization process to become a for-profit public benefit corporation.
OpenAI is credited with kickstarting the AI hype cycle by releasing ChatGPT in 2022.
Although the company’s chatbot is so popular that “ChatGPT” has become practically synonymous with the term “AI chatbot”, in recent months competitors Anthropic and Google have made progress and dazzled users with high-profile releases. The comparisons were so bad that OpenAI declared a “Code Red” in December, even before Anthropic made headlines with Cloud Cowork in February and Mythos in April.
The path to this IPO filing is full of hurdles. Earlier this week, a jury ruled in favor of OpenAI in a lawsuit filed by co-founder Elon Musk, in which the billionaire had asked the court to reverse OpenAI’s for-profit conversion and oust CEO Sam Altman from the company.
Additionally, there is also the issue of profitability or lack thereof. For several months now, the company has been engaged in a major cost-cutting and revenue maximization effort that includes the introduction of advertisements in ChatGPT and the closure of the video generator Sora.
But even with those measures, the road to profitability may still be tough for the AI giant. Last month, the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said ChatGPT’s growth was set to slow by the end of 2025 and that the chatbot had missed internal revenue and active user targets. The report also claimed that CFO Sarah Fryer was concerned about revenue growth and was unsure whether OpenAI would be able to pay for its many computing contracts.
Another recent report, this time by The Information, claimed that there were differences of opinion between Fryer and Altman over OpenAI’s IPO timeline, with the CFO reportedly believing that the company was not well positioned for an IPO this year.
OpenAI is the third of three big AI-related IPOs the market is preparing for this year. The first was SpaceX, led by OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, whose legal differences with Altman and the company were resolved in OpenAI’s favor just last month. SpaceX is expected to officially begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday. The second was OpenAI’s number one rival, Anthropic, which confidentially filed for an IPO last week.
If they perform well, the offering could have a positive impact on the broader US market. But if they crash and burn, it will impact the entire economic system in its own way.
Investors are already quite wary of Silicon Valley’s justification for pouring huge amounts of money into AI infrastructure. Some experts are painting disaster scenarios of a very real possibility in which demand for AI does not grow as expected in the short term, and investment, which some say is boosting the entire US economy, causes a fear bubble to burst.
Whatever information OpenAI ultimately shares about its financial metrics in its IPO process will be an incredibly rare and valuable glimpse of whether the AI industry has the results to support the hype.
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