Startups

OpenAI files confidential S-1, joining Anthropic in a $3.6 trillion AI IPO pipeline

The ChatGPT maker submitted draft paperwork to the SEC a week after Anthropic, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lining up a potential fall 2026 listing.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-06-12 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Aditya Vyas — The facade of the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street

OpenAI confirmed Monday that it has submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC, disclosing the move in a blog post and slotting itself into a pipeline of AI and adjacent listings that Bloomberg now values at roughly $3.6 trillion. Anthropic filed more than a week earlier. SpaceX kicked off its roadshow last week at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. The race to set the template for how public markets price frontier AI is on.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading OpenAI’s process, with a fall 2026 listing and an employee tender offer in the works, per The Wall Street Journal. The company was last marked at $852 billion post-money. Anthropic closed a round last month at $965 billion. Investment bankers, Bloomberg reports, have been telling both companies that whoever lists first will set the terms by which Wall Street categorizes the entire sector, the index inclusions, the comp tables, the multiples.

The S-1, once it becomes public, will force OpenAI to disclose revenue for the first time. Sam Altman, in a separate post Monday, said enterprise accounts for more than 40% of revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of 2026. Fortune, citing internal documents, reports management is projecting a $14 billion loss in 2026, and the company doesn’t expect to be profitable until 2029.

CFO Sarah Friar previewed the logic to CNBC in April, calling it “good hygiene” for a business of OpenAI’s size to “look and feel and act” like a public company. That’s the polite framing. The harder one is that the SEC under the Trump administration has adopted a markedly more permissive posture toward tech and AI issuers than the prior cycle, and OpenAI is filing while reportedly missing its own user and revenue targets, per the Journal. The window is open, the comps haven’t been set, and the regulator isn’t asking hard questions about pre-profit AI economics. Comparable conditions in 1999 produced the listings that defined a generation of dot-com valuation logic, for better and mostly worse.

There’s also a tell buried in SpaceX’s own filing, which names OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as “key competitors” in AI. Elon Musk’s rocket company is now telling its prospective shareholders that it’s, in part, an AI company. The categorization fight is the listing fight.

Sources