With OpenAI‘s announcement Monday that—like Anthropic—it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the race for the mega-AI lab IPO is officially on.
In a post on the OpenAI website, the company said that it had recently submitted a confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company said. “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. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
Anthropic’s announcement last week was equally light, saying that its “proposed IPO will depend on market conditions and other factors.”
While the timing is uncertain, the fact that both companies have taken this step—getting draft versions of their IPO prospectuses into regulators’ hands for feedback—means they want to be ready to pull the trigger at any time, whether it be now or several quarters from now. With confidential filings of an S-1— the registration document a company must file before going public—companies are able to privately receive feedback on their disclosure statements from the Securities and Exchange Commission and make revisions before presenting the information to investors. Ensuring their IPO documents have the blessing of the Securities and Exchange Commission gives companies the luxury to base their timing decisions on other factors.
After SpaceX’s record IPO set to take place later this week, attention will turn to the two AI giants as they take their rivalry to the public markets. And as PitchBook’s Kyle Stanford, director of US VC research, has previously posited, these three companies have the potential to break the IPO gates fully open or swallow the whole market and shut it closed for other candidates.
In late May, Anthropic, maker of Claude AI, became the world’s most valuable startup after announcing it raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion valuation. That surpassed OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852 billion.
SpaceX, after initial floating plans to go public at a $2 trillion valuation, announced a target of $1.8 trillion.
