OpenAI confidentially filed on Monday for a U.S. initial public offering (IPO), marking the latest tech giant to move toward the stock market following rival Anthropic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The company behind ChatGPT said a timeline has not been determined and did not disclose the size or terms of the offering, adding that it “may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said in a statement.
Previous reporting showed that the AI giant is targeting an up to $1 trillion valuation in its stock market debut, which could come as early as September.
At this amount, OpenAI would become the third recent trillion-dollar valuation company debuting on U.S. markets, behind Anthropic and SpaceX, and is expected to be one of the most momentous tests of investors’ interest in technology stocks in the last decade.
Earlier this year, OpenAI said it was raising $110 billion at an $840 billion valuation from backers that included SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia. At the same time, the company reported that its ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers.
The company said in March that it was generating $2 billion in monthly revenue and growing four times faster than companies that defined the internet.
OpenAI’s Monday IPO filing comes after it renegotiated its partnership with Microsoft, which was one of its earliest investors. The renegotiation allowed OpenAI to pursue new partnerships with other tech giants such as Amazon and Alphabet’s Google.
But its main competitor, Anthropic, has also seen a meteoric rise. Demand for Anthropic’s Claude AI soared among software developers. Some firms have begun deploying its Mythos model to handle problems in their coding.
Anthropic confidentially filed for its U.S. IPO on June 1—exactly a week before OpenAI. The company had recently raised $65 billion in a funding round that valued Anthropic at $965 billion.
Musk, a cofounder of OpenAI, and the company’s head, Sam Altman, battled in a California courtroom last month over the SpaceX billionaire’s claim that Altman turned OpenAI from a nonprofit into a for-profit model that is no longer beholden to the public good.
Musk’s attorney said he may appeal, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said there may be no point in doing so.
“There’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot,” she said.
Musk had accused Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman of stealing the charitable mission of the company.
“Do you want to set legal precedent in the United States that it is OK to loot a charity? If so, you undermine all charitable giving in the United States forever,” Musk said in an April 27 post on X.
“I could have started OpenAI as a for-profit corporation. Instead, I started it, funded it, recruited critical talent and taught them everything I know about how to make a startup successful FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD.”
During the trial, Altman countered that he had never promised to keep OpenAI a nonprofit forever, and that Musk filed the lawsuit because he couldn’t have complete control of the company. In a court filing, the company said Musk knew it intended to adopt a for-profit model as early as 2018.
“He didn’t bring a lawsuit then, he only brought it when he was a competitor, years later,” attorneys for OpenAI told the court on April 28.
Attorneys for OpenAI also argued that Musk is no longer a “member, director, or officer of OpenAI,” and therefore had no right to sue for mismanagement of charitable donations under California law.
Although Musk’s legal challenge against OpenAI has apparently been resolved, others remain.
“We are not going to allow the American public to have clinical trials run on them by OpenAI and ChatGPT,” attorney Bakari Sellers said in a May 11 news conference announcing the lawsuit for the family of one of the victims.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI over the alleged FSU shooter’s use of ChatGPT.
“If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder,” Uthmeier said.
Florida is the first state in the country to sue OpenAI over concerns of its chatbot’s alleged risk to children and vulnerable users. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT has encouraged suicides, shootings, and other crimes.
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit saying the company has recognized the power of AI technology and has already taken steps to protect users.
The company stated that it is working with law enforcement in cases against the people charged in the incidents cited in the lawsuit.