The statement from OpenAI was brief and, for a company whose every move is parsed, carefully noncommittal: the company regularly evaluates a range of strategic options, and its focus remains on execution. The context made the words land differently. OpenAI is preparing to submit a filing for an initial public offering within weeks and could list in the fall, according to people familiar with the matter, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley helping to manage the deal.
The timing is the news. OpenAI has been valued in private markets at about $850 billion since a funding round in March, and people familiar with the discussions say a listing could target a valuation approaching $1 trillion — which would make it the largest technology IPO on record, eclipsing Alibaba’s $25 billion debut in 2014 and Meta’s offering in 2012. A confidential filing could come as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the planning, though the exact date remains uncertain.
The path to public markets
The IPO has been anticipated for more than a year, and the obstacles that once stood in its way have been clearing. OpenAI spent 2025 restructuring from a capped-profit company into a for-profit Delaware corporation, a prerequisite for a public listing. A lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against the company and its chief executive, Sam Altman, was dismissed this year, removing what bankers described as a legal cloud over the deal.
What remains unusual is the financial profile OpenAI will present. The company is growing revenue quickly — it reported roughly $5.7 billion in first-quarter revenue, and it has said it is on track toward $30 billion for the year — but it is losing money at a scale that would have made a traditional IPO impossible in any earlier era. Investors will be buying a bet on the future of AI demand, not a company with a conventional path to profitability.
The market’s appetite
Bankers and investors say the deal will test the market’s conviction in AI at a moment of maximum enthusiasm. The offering would give public investors their first direct stake in the company that started the current AI wave, and the narrative — ChatGPT’s hundreds of millions of users, the enterprise push led by its Codex coding product, the advertising experiments inside the app — is compelling enough that underwriters expect demand to be substantial.
The timing also reflects a crowded calendar. Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, has been preparing its own path to public markets and is reportedly targeting a listing later this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Two frontier labs have never gone public within months of each other, and the pair of offerings would give investors a direct comparison of the two companies’ financial models: OpenAI’s scale-first approach against Anthropic’s push toward profitability.
What investors will scrutinize
The S-1, when it becomes public, will answer the questions that matter: the size of the losses, the terms of the company’s compute agreements, the ownership structure after the nonprofit’s conversion, and how much of the company’s revenue is genuinely durable. The valuation question is simpler to state than to resolve. A $1 trillion price tag would value OpenAI at roughly thirty times its projected revenue — a multiple that assumes growth continues at something close to its current pace for years.
The confidential-filing route is well worn. Companies submit their registration to the SEC privately, negotiate comments, and make the documents public only weeks before the roadshow — a process that lets OpenAI manage the disclosure of its most sensitive financials until the market’s attention is focused on the deal. Under a standard timetable, a filing this month would point to a public prospectus by late summer and a listing in the fall, assuming the SEC review proceeds without complications.
For the bankers involved, the deal is a career-defining assignment. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which led some of the largest technology IPOs of the past decade, are expected to be joined by a syndicate of additional banks as the offering takes shape. The fees alone would be substantial, but the prestige is the point: underwriting OpenAI’s debut is a calling card for every AI company that follows it to market.
The offering also arrives at a delicate moment for the AI sector’s finances. The industry’s appetite for capital has never been larger — OpenAI alone has raised more than $100 billion across recent rounds, much of it from computing partners — and public markets are the next source of funding for the entire complex. A successful OpenAI listing would open the door for Anthropic, for chip designers and for the data-center builders that serve them. A failure would close it. That is why the fall listing, when it comes, will be read less as a company event than as a verdict on the AI economy as a whole.
OpenAI is weeks away from the most anticipated IPO filing in years, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley managing a deal that could value the company at close to $1 trillion. The legal obstacles have cleared, the revenue is growing, and the losses are enormous. Public investors will soon get to price the company that defined the AI boom — and their answer will shape how every other AI company is valued in the years after.
