OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has submitted a confidential filing for an initial public offering, as announced in a Monday blog post. This move comes just over a week after its primary competitor, Anthropic, also filed to go public, intensifying the rivalry between the two artificial intelligence firms. OpenAI, last valued at $852 billion after funding, has submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO, though it has not yet specified the number of shares or a price range.

This filing signals that 2026 could be a landmark year for public markets, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX also expected to debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation. OpenAI is pushing toward its IPO despite recently missing internal targets for new users and revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar reportedly expressed concerns that the company might not sustain its heavy spending on data centers. Indeed, the burn rate appears substantial: in late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in what was Silicon Valley’s largest funding round ever, including $3 billion directly from retail investors through bank channels. However, the firm is projected to spend that entire amount on computing power for AI research in 2028 alone, and it expects to burn $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the previous year. OpenAI does not anticipate positive cash flow until 2030.

SpaceX’s AI spending, though smaller, illustrates a broader trend: the cost of training large language models often exceeds the revenue they generate. Anthropic, meanwhile, has painted a much brighter financial picture for investors, claiming it is nearing its first quarterly profit. Still, with a recent $65 billion funding round and potentially another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt on the horizon, Anthropic’s burn rate is hardly modest.

The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to begin preparations for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial data or business risks, which explains why it hasn’t revealed stock pricing or the amount it hopes to raise yet. However, secondary markets offer some insight into investor sentiment. Anthropic recently surged to a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassing OpenAI, which was valued at around $880 billion in April. David Shapiro, founder and CEO of OpenVC, who oversees the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index tracking major U.S. public and private companies, noted that Anthropic’s appreciation rate far exceeds OpenAI’s this year—123% year-to-date versus OpenAI’s 11.3%. Despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI hasn’t seen a lack of secondary interest. “From a secondary investor standpoint, OpenAI had already grown into a significant portion of its valuation,” Shapiro said. “We haven’t seen OpenAI crater or anything close, and valuation is still enormously successful, according to the index.” He added that OpenAI’s stock in the secondary market “experienced a slight pop over the last few days, indicating investors may be pricing both as the ‘dual winners’ of the broader LLM race.”

The race to reach public markets first is a genuine concern. Experts suggest that whichever company debuts first will likely capture more of the increasingly scarce capital available for AI firms, much of which will already be allocated to SpaceX, expected to IPO first among the three. Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will set a valuation benchmark that could constrain how OpenAI prices its own offering, according to a recent PitchBook report that viewed OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals.

OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, revolutionized the AI landscape when it launched ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of large language model advancements across the industry. While the company has expanded its products to serve enterprise and government clients, it is widely seen as more consumer-focused than its rival Anthropic. OpenAI has built significant scale, boasting around 900 million weekly active users.

The IPO follows notable internal turmoil. In 2022, OpenAI’s board ousted CEO Sam Altman due to concerns about a lack of transparency and trust in his commitment to the company’s mission of benefiting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and those involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, departed soon after. More recently, OpenAI has faced multiple lawsuits, including one from the state of Florida accusing the company and Altman of harming children by allegedly providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm, and addicting young users. This complaint adds to a growing list of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers involving user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events. Last month, OpenAI went to trial after Elon Musk, one of its co-founders and a competitor, sued the company and Altman, alleging they violated a promise to keep it a nonprofit. The case was dismissed after a jury and judge determined that Musk had exceeded the statute of limitations when he filed in 2024. OpenAI has also faced criticism after its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI PAC aimed at opposing local politicians advocating for AI regulation. They made similar contributions to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has sought to distance itself from Brockman’s “personal” donations, stating that none of the funds were provided on behalf of the company.