OpenAI confidentially files for initial public offering on US stock market

OpenAI has filed confidentially to go public on the US stock market, according to a company blogpost published on Monday. The artificial intelligence giant’s debut on Wall Street is expected to be one of the most highly valued listings in market history with a valuation at more than $850bn. “We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company’s post reads. “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.” An S-1 is an investor prospectus submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in advance of an initial public offering (IPO). The confidential filing will give regulators a period to review and discuss the company’s financial disclosures before investors and the public are able to view them. OpenAI’s chief rival Anthropic, which makes the popular Claude chatbot, announced last week that it was also filing to go public on the US stock market. OpenAI’s approaching IPO will mark the culmination of a meteoric rise since its founding as a non-profit research lab in 2015, led by Sam Altman , its CEO. After working on generative artificial intelligence in beta for several years, the company publicly released ChatGPT in 2022 and converted to a for-profit structure. …