OpenAI Joins IPO Race With Confidential S-1 Filing

(RTTNews) - OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, announced that it has recently filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for potential initial public offering, thus entering the IPO race by major players in the artificial intelligence or AI industry. The firm said it is yet to decide on the timing.

In a statement, the company confirmed, "We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it."

OpenAI added that "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."

A confidential S-1 filing is a private submission of a company's draft registration statement to the U.S. SEC

According to OpenAI, any offers, solicitations of offers to buy, or any sales of securities will be made in accordance with the registration requirements of the Securities Act.

OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, has been considered a major player in the AI with the success of its chatbot ChatGPT. The San Francisco-based company, which Altman cofounded with billionaire Elon Musk and others in 2015, has been a non-profit AI startup initially with a view to utilizing AI for the benefit of humankind.

However, in 2019, the firm shifted to a "capped-profit" model called OpenAI LP, allowing it to attract investment while still aiming to prioritize safety and ethical considerations, with Microsoft Corp. being its largest investor.

In late February this year, OpenAI said it has secured $110 billion in new funding at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, marking one of the largest capital raises in the technology sector. The investment includeds $30 billion each from SoftBank and NVIDIA Corp., and $50 billion from Amazon.com Inc.

At that time, ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers, while more than 9 million paying business users rely on its tools. Weekly users of Codex, its software development tool, had more than tripled to 1.6 million.

In late April, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, and that the stumbles have raised concern among some company leaders about whether OpenAI would be able to support its massive spending on data centers.

The latest IPO news comes at a time when competition in the AI field is heating up, with Anthropic and Google, among others, are pushing forward with their coding and enterprise AI tools.

Anthropic, a major player in the AI space founded back in 2021 by ex-OpenAI researchers and executives, in early June submitted a registration statement to the SEC for a potential IPO.

Anthropic, with its Claude models, including the popular Claude Code programming assistant, reached a valuation of $965 billion after their latest funding round, overtaking OpenAI, which had a valuation of $852 billion earlier this year.

In other IPO developments, Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or SpaceX in early June filed with the SEC to price its earlier announced IPO of around 556 million shares at $135.00 per share, with a view to raising around $75 billion, making it the largest stock market debut in history.