OpenAI files for IPO as AI listing race heats up with SpaceX, Anthropic

OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, weeks after resolving a court dispute with co-founder Elon Musk and as rival SpaceX prepares its own market debut. The ChatGPT maker raised $122 billion from private investors at an $852 billion valuation earlier this year, though it has missed some internal revenue targets and lost several key executives, Bloomberg reported.

The confidential filing sets up a potential logjam of three mega-IPOs this year. Anthropic is also pursuing a listing. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while,” OpenAI said, according to Bloomberg. The timing may hinge on SpaceX's own offering. Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times wrote that OpenAI's decision “rests more on the outcome of SpaceX's IPO ... than on just about anything else.”

The question of market capacity is not hypothetical. Google parent Alphabet last week raised $85 billion in a bond sale. Meta is weighing a stock offer, Sam Goldfarb reported in The Wall Street Journal. Wall Street is “rushing to fund the AI bonanza in every conceivable way,” Goldfarb wrote.

OpenAI is also planning the biggest overhaul of ChatGPT since its launch, aiming to build a “superapp” that combines coding tools and AI agents, Cristina Criddle reported in the Financial Times. The move reflects a growing conviction inside the company that the future of AI lies in agents that perform tasks rather than chatbots that answer questions. “Chat is dead,” a senior OpenAI official said.