Startups

OpenAI files confidentially for IPO a week after Anthropic, setting up a $3.6 trillion AI listing pipeline

The ChatGPT maker submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on Monday at an $852 billion valuation, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading a potential fall debut.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-06-10 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Aditya Vyas — Facade of the New York Stock Exchange building with American flags.

OpenAI submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC on Monday at an $852 billion valuation, slotting in behind Anthropic’s own filing from a little more than a week earlier and assembling, with SpaceX, a roughly $3.6 trillion pipeline of AI listings now staged for Wall Street. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, with a debut possible as soon as Q4 2026.

The official posture is studied ambivalence. “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,” the company said, a sentence that reads less like calendar guidance than narrative management for an exit it has clearly begun staging.

The numbers underneath that calm aren’t calm. OpenAI’s $852 billion mark stems from its March round, when it raised $122 billion, the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history, with roughly $3 billion sourced directly from retail investors through bank channels. By the company’s own projections, it won’t generate more cash than it spends for at least four more years. The Wall Street Journal has reported that ChatGPT, despite passing 900 million weekly active users, recently missed internal targets for users and revenue, and that CFO Sarah Friar has raised concerns internally about whether OpenAI can sustain its data center commitments.

The competitive frame is sharper still. Anthropic, last valued at $965 billion after a $65 billion round, with another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially in train, has told investors it’s close to its first quarterly profit. SpaceX, valued near $1.8 trillion and freshly merged with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, completes the trio. Google watches from the sidelines as a public incumbent.

A planned tender offer at the $852 billion mark will let OpenAI employees take chips off the table before any retail bell-ringing. That sequencing, insiders first, public markets later, is the part worth watching. It’s the same choreography Silicon Valley used in 2019 with Uber and Lyft, when private-round valuations defined the IPO ceiling rather than the floor, and the question was always who got liquid before the multiple compressed.

Sources