OpenAI Submits Confidential S-1 to SEC but Says IPO Decision Remains Years Away
OpenAI submitted a confidential registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The filing follows Anthropic’s June 1 submission and comes ahead of SpaceX’s planned trillion-dollar IPO on Friday.
WiredU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission received a confidential S-1 filing from OpenAI on Monday. The announcement came one week after Anthropic filed its confidential IPO paperwork on June 1. OpenAI’s last funding round in March valued the company at $852 billion after it raised $122 billion.
Anthropic’s most recent round placed its valuation at $965 billion. Elon Musk’s SpaceX publicly filed its IPO papers last month, and its trillion-dollar offering is set for Friday. Confidential S-1 documents typically arrive about six to nine months before a company goes public.
OpenAI executives have debated for months whether the company is prepared to go public. At one point last year, OpenAI was targeting an IPO in late 2027 or early 2028. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, addressed the filing in a CNBC interview.
“I think there is a race to deliver the best technology and build the best business,” he said. OpenAI is in discussions with the Trump Administration about the government taking a stake in the company. OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019, and the nonprofit owns roughly 25 percent, or more than $200 billion, of the company.
OpenAI’s revenue from subscriptions, ads, and service fees grew to somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion last year. The company spent far more on cloud computing and staff, leading to billions of dollars in losses. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees.
Musk’s claims in a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of straying from its nonprofit mission were dismissed last month after a federal judge and jury ruled that he filed the suit too late. OpenAI’s structure remains subject to ongoing scrutiny by California and Delaware state regulators.
Last month, OpenAI’s chief of global affairs, Chris Lehane, told WIRED that the company will retain its structure after the IPO.
This month, the California attorney general’s office denied WIRED’s request for records of recent communications with OpenAI. At least several early OpenAI employees, including president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have become multibillionaires because of the value of the shares they hold in the company.
