OpenAI has revealed plans to sell shares to the public, filing a confidential initial public offering (IPO) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday — exactly one week after rival AI firm Anthropic said it was planning to go public too.
The company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot said in a statement that it had not decided on the timing yet. “It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said, adding that it was revealing its plans because “we expect it to leak”.
“OpenAI filed for an IPO one week after rival Anthropic, intensifying their race to go public.”
The decision had been expected for months, but the filing intensifies a fierce rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude. The two companies have competed for users, corporate customers and investors, with private valuations inching toward $1tn. OpenAI’s most recent private valuation was $852bn; Anthropic’s hit $965bn.
Their plans to list follow that of SpaceX, the Elon Musk company set to debut on the Nasdaq on Friday at a price per share that the company expects will value it at $1.75tn (£1.3tn). Both OpenAI and Anthropic are more focused on AI work, and the rivalry traces back to Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic five years ago after leaving OpenAI over disagreements with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co‑founder and chief executive.
Just last week, Altman told CNBC he was in no rush to take OpenAI public and would do it “when it makes sense”. Having filed with the SEC, the company now has “the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best”.
Selling shares to the public is likely to give these companies — along with SpaceX, which also owns the controversial AI chatbot Grok — billions of dollars in capital. That money is crucial for AI firms, whose most costly aspect is “compute” — the infrastructure and processing power required to build, train and run offerings such as chatbots. OpenAI’s compute costs are estimated to be over $100bn a year, while its revenue is a fraction of that. SpaceX is also far from profitable.
Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has said exactly when it might debut on the public stock market. The two companies are now competing not only for users and investors, but for who will get there first.