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ChatGPT developer OpenAI has filed preliminary paperwork that will open the door to becoming a publicly traded company, the third in a trio of artificial intelligence companies vying for a Wall Street listing.
The San Francisco-based company said Monday it filed confidential documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We expect it to leak so we are just announcing it,” the company said in a statement. “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 complex set of transactions and this gives us an opportunity to go public sooner if that ends up being better.”
OpenAI’s move follows rival Anthropic’s June 1 announcement that it is also looking at an initial public offering. Both now follow Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, which has launched an IPO pitching itself as an AI-focused space company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first publicly floated the possibility of an IPO last fall, describing it as the company’s “most likely path” given its size and need for more capital to develop its technology.
OpenAI started in 2015 as a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing AI for the benefit of all and is now an $852 billion company.
The filing comes at a “critical time” for OpenAI as it appears to be losing ChatGPT’s strong lead with consumers and businesses to Google and Anthropic, said Emarketer analyst Nate Elliott.
“OpenAI doesn’t have many other places to look for the capital needed to support its costs,” Elliott said.
Paving the way for transparency was OpenAI’s decision last year to restructure its business and transform itself into a public benefit organization while remaining under the control of a non-profit technology organization.
OpenAI cleared another hurdle last month with its victory over Musk in a federal judge case. Musk, OpenAI’s co-founder and early donor, had sued the company seeking to oust Altman from its leadership and reveal its conversion to a for-profit business. The judge dismissed the case after the jury found that Musk filed his lawsuit too late.
OpenAI has not publicly disclosed how much money it makes or when it plans to turn a profit. Like Anthropic and SpaceX, the company was losing more money than it was making because of the high cost of building the business. OpenAI faces stiff competition from Anthropic, maker of the increasingly popular chatbot Claude, and Google’s AI assistant Gemini.
In an April interview, OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar declined to provide a timeline for a potential IPO but said the company is already “practicing good public company hygiene,” such as measuring revenue the way a publicly traded company must report profits to the SEC.
“I want us to be ready,” he told the Associated Press. “I think it’s great to be able to access public markets. They’re much bigger than private markets.”
He said OpenAI’s current valuation would make it one of the 15 largest companies in the S&P 500.
He also said that there is “a time to confirm being a public company.”
“At that time, people are looking at your balance sheet, the SEC is regulating you and so on,” he said.
CEO envisions AI for everyone
In a separate statement on Monday published at the same time as the announcement of the private placement, Altman outlined a broad vision for OpenAI that includes three major goals: to create an automated AI researcher, to accelerate economic growth and to provide “every person on the planet with personal AGI,” which stands for general artificial intelligence, or the type of AI that surpasses humans in many tasks.
Altman said OpenAI started in AI research and moved on to commercial product development but is now entering its third phase involving “broader distribution of power” as the economy shifts again to AI technology.
He said OpenAI is “working to ensure that achievements are widely shared. Everyone should have the opportunity to meaningfully participate in the prosperity that AI creates.”
These comments follow Altman’s visit last week with US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is pushing a plan for the public to take a 50 percent ownership stake in AI companies such as OpenAI, and President Donald Trump’s comments welcoming public participation in the growth of AI.
