Sam Altman’s OpenAI Confidentially Files for IPO, Eyes $850+ Billion Valuation
OpenAI just took its most concrete step yet toward Wall Street, while going out of its way to say it has not actually decided to go public. The company confidentially filed S-1 IPO paperwork with the SEC and disclosed the move in a blog post. OpenAI was valued at roughly 122 billion financing round in March.
A confidential SEC filing is a preparatory step. It lets a company assemble an S-1 with the regulator behind closed doors, preserving optionality on timing without forcing public disclosure of financials. OpenAI explicitly framed the move as preserving choice, calling going public “a complicated set of trade-offs” and saying the filing simply gives the company the option to move quickly if it chooses.
On timing, CNBC’s Kate Rooney reported: “I am also told by a source at OpenAI, it could go as soon as September, although market conditions will be a big factor.”
The filing lands in the middle of what is shaping up to be a historic year for mega-cap debuts. Anthropic, valued at around $965 billion, confidentially filed its own IPO paperwork a week earlier, and SpaceX is set to begin trading within days. Polymarket traders currently assign a 68.5% probability to an OpenAI IPO by December 31, 2026, but only a 31% probability for a September listing.
Per Pitchbook, OpenAI is spending 1 earned, a burn rate driven by hundreds of billions of dollars in data-center spending. The company also plans to let employees sell shares via a tender offer at the current valuation, which relieves internal liquidity pressure that often forces a company to go public.
OpenAI has been working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the filing — the same two investment banks listed at the top of SpaceX’s filing.