OpenAI filed to go public, and now two AI giants are racing to list

OpenAI has told the world it wants to go public. On 8 June the company confirmed it had filed a confidential draft S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the paperwork every firm submits before it sells shares to the public. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are reportedly leading the deal.

The number doing the rounds is the eye-watering part. Reports put the target valuation between $730 billion and $850 billion, and several analysts think it lands north of $1 trillion once the books open. For a company most people had never used three years ago, that is a staggering figure.

Why go public now

An IPO does two things at once. It lets early backers and staff cash out, and it raises a war chest. OpenAI is spending enormous sums on compute, data centres and talent, and a listing is the cleanest way to fund that without leaning entirely on Microsoft and a handful of private investors.

The flip side is scrutiny. Public companies file quarterly numbers, so the rest of us finally get to see what running ChatGPT actually costs. OpenAI is in no rush to set a date. It said the timing is undecided and that a listing "may be a while" off. A confidential filing buys exactly that flexibility: start the clock with regulators quietly, then pick your moment when the market looks friendly.

The bigger story: two giants, one exit

Here is what makes this more than one company's paperwork. Anthropic, the maker of Claude and OpenAI's closest rival, filed weeks earlier, reportedly at a valuation near $965 billion. So the two biggest names in AI are walking toward the public markets at the same time.

That matters because an IPO is a verdict. Private valuations are set by a small room of investors who all want the number to go up. A public listing hands the price to everyone, pension funds, day traders and sceptics included. If both companies list within months of each other, we get the first real market test of whether AI is the business its boosters claim, or whether the spending has run ahead of the revenue.

What to actually watch

Ignore the valuation headlines for a second. The interesting lines will be buried in the filings: how much each company earns, how fast that is growing, and how much it burns to get there. Anthropic's run rate reportedly crossed $47 billion in May. OpenAI's revenue is larger, but so are its costs. When the full filings go public, those pages are where the story is.

Nothing is locked in. OpenAI could list in September or sit on the filing into next year. But the direction is set. The companies that spent three years telling us AI would change everything are about to ask the public to buy in, literally.