OpenAI, perhaps the best-known company in the burgeoning artificial intelligence market, filed for bankruptcy on Monday for its first public offering. Although there is no date yet for the company’s public offering, this is a highly anticipated move, and according to the New York Times, the OpenAI IPO “could be one of the largest public offerings on Wall Street.”
“We just sent a secret S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement posted to X on Monday afternoon. “We haven’t decided on a time yet; it may be time because there are things we want to do that may be easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated transaction process and this gives us the opportunity to go public quickly if that ends up being better.”
The confidential filing means that, while OpenAI may have started the IPO process and filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the details remain confidential. It differs from a public filing, where the company’s prospectus and financial information are available for investors to review.
A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’ copyrights in training and using its AI programs.)
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (Musk left the company’s board in 2018, and later sued Altman, in a case that ended in Altman’s favor. just last month.) In 2022, the company released by ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot based on a linguistic technology model. Few applications have grown as quickly as ChatGPT, which has piled up hundreds of millions of users in record time and, for many people, short for AI chatbots.
The IPO will be closely watched, as investors weigh in Altman’s warnings about the AI bubble they are right.
If OpenAI goes public, it will join a slate of high-profile IPOs expected this year, including Musk’s SpaceX and Anthropic, OpenAI’s biggest competitor in artificial intelligence.
The rush to IPOs partly reflects how willing investors are to turn AI bets into profits, as companies push to raise the large amounts of capital they need to stay afloat. AI is an expensive business, with costs driven by the computing power required to train large language models and the data centers, chips and power infrastructure required to run it.
First social risks
The OpenAI IPO could be historic and high-profile. To date, the AI industry has been largely driven by speculation, with valuations more related to future promise than current profit. An online tracker of the revenue and losses of borderline AI companies shows that AI development has cost more than double what it has done so far, raising billions of dollars in debt.
OpenAI’s true credit is hard to pin down because it’s a private company. Some reports say its partners and infrastructure backers have taken on roughly $96 million in debt to support AI development, while other estimates say OpenAI has made about $1.4 billion in long-term commitments for computing and power.
While widespread recognition of the OpenAI brand and products could drive strong investor demand and support a high stock price, going public exposes the company to scrutiny for its high operating costs and lack of profitability.
Greater financial transparency will also subject OpenAI to increased regulatory scrutiny, which could expose legal, privacy or copyright-related challenges.
Some critics point to the mismatch between optimistic projections of AI growth and current economic reality. The OpenAI IPO may require investors to price in a large increase to come despite this uncertainty. Overall, the IPO race can serve as a comprehensive stress test to determine whether the AI industry is actually based on a sustainable business model.
