OpenAI has taken an early step towards a possible stock market flotation, opening a new chapter in the race among artificial intelligence companies to secure funding for costly expansion.
The developer of ChatGPT said it had submitted confidential paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering in the United States. The filing does not mean a listing is imminent, and the company has not set out a timetable for when shares could become available to investors.
“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said in a statement.
The move comes one week after Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, disclosed plans to pursue its own listing. The two businesses have become prominent rivals in the rapidly expanding AI industry, competing for users, corporate customers, investors, and the computing infrastructure required to build increasingly sophisticated systems.
Anthropic was co-founded by Dario Amodei after he left OpenAI following disagreements with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief executive. Their companies have since emerged as two of the most closely watched players in the sector.
OpenAI was most recently valued at $852 billion, while Anthropic’s latest private valuation reached $965 billion. Neither company has confirmed when it expects to complete a listing.
Altman told CNBC last week that OpenAI would go public “when it makes sense.” OpenAI later said it was making its plans known because “we expect it to leak,” while describing the decision as “a complicated set of tradeoffs.”
A flotation could give the company access to billions of dollars in additional capital. That funding would help cover the enormous cost of compute, the processing power and infrastructure needed to train, test, and operate AI tools.
Entering the public markets would also bring greater scrutiny. OpenAI and Anthropic would be required to disclose their financial performance regularly, allowing investors to assess whether their fast-growing businesses can justify their soaring valuations.