OpenAI Files SEC Paperwork To Go Public

Exactly a week after Anthropic announced its plan to go public, OpenAI has followed suit. The company said on Monday that it confidentially submitted a S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission. No date or offer price has been set by OpenAI yet for the initial public offering.

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. 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. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,” the company wrote on its website.

As the date of the public offering gets closer, it will give journalists and financial analysts the chance to look at OpenAI’s books. Following its most recent fundraising round, which saw companies like NVIDIA and Amazon pour an additional $122 billion into the company, OpenAI valuation ballooned to $852 billion. Recent reporting from The Information suggests the company recorded $25 billion in annualized revenue as of the end of February. However, the company is also projected to burn as much $115 billion through 2029 on compute costs and other expenses, raising the question of whether the company has a route toward profitability. 

Complicating that question is the fierce competition OpenAI faces from other players in the AI space, including Anthropic and of course Google. Following ChatGPT’s breakout success in 2022, the search giant has largely managed to catch up and surpass OpenAI in the competition to offer the best model, including, most significantly, when it launched Gemini 3 Pro last November. OpenAI also faces other roadblocks, many of them of its own making. In April, the families of the victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting sued the company for negligence, claiming it failed to act on warnings from its automated safety systems.