It is being billed as the biggest stock market launch in history, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is not the only giant racing to go public. On Monday, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, revealed its plans for a stock listing, exactly one week after rival AI firm Anthropic said it was doing the same.
OpenAI said it had made a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to pursue an initial public offering at some point in the future. “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. But it added that it was revealing its plans because “we expect it to leak”.
“SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all revealed IPO plans, with SpaceX set for the biggest stock market launch in history.”
SpaceX is set to debut on the Nasdaq on Friday, targeting a share price that would value the company at $1.75tn (£1.3tn). The company plans to sell 555.6m shares, raising $75bn (£56bn) from the sale, which would put Musk on course to become the world’s first trillionaire. Up to a quarter of the shares could be reserved for individual investors – a far bigger share than is typical in large IPOs.
The three firms all have a “vast need for cash”, said Sunil Krishnan from Aviva Investors, and “no-one wants to be last” in the game to go public. He told the BBC’s Today programme that the firms are making huge investments in AI infrastructure, including chips and training models, all at massive expense.
OpenAI and Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, have been fierce rivals since Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic five years ago after leaving OpenAI over disagreements with Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI. Today they compete for users, corporate customers and investors, and have been jockeying with private valuations inching toward $1tn. OpenAI’s most recent private valuation was $852bn, while Anthropic’s hit $965bn.
Investors are closely tracking the listings, because their performance will shape expectations for others, said assistant professor Richard Crowley from the Singapore Management University. “We might typically think of OpenAI and Anthropic as competitors, but the fate of their financing is intrinsically intertwined through the public’s perception of the generative AI space,” he said.
Last week, Altman said in an interview with CNBC that he was in no rush to take OpenAI public, and would do it “when it makes sense”. The companies now compete to see who might debut first – but neither has said exactly when.