OpenAI preparing confidential US IPO filing, aiming for September listing

TL;DR:

  • OpenAI is preparing to confidentially file for a US initial public offering in the coming weeks and is aiming to go public as early as September, working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on a draft prospectus.
  • The plan comes two days after OpenAI defeated Elon Musk’s lawsuit and threatens to upstage SpaceX’s IPO filing, which lands on the same news cycle and runs through the same Wall Street roster.
  • OpenAI was last valued at around £670bn ($852bn) in October, with an IPO targeting up to £790bn ($1tn) in valuation and at least £47bn ($60bn) of capital raised at the low end of preliminary discussions.

The filing — described to Reuters by people familiar with the matter — comes the same day Anthropic told investors it is closing in on its first quarterly operating profit on £8.6bn ($10.9bn) of June-quarter sales. The two stories cannot be cleanly separated: OpenAI’s IPO trajectory now sits in a market that has visible evidence Anthropic is approaching profitability with what some industry watchers expect to be faster enterprise revenue growth.

Why the timing matters for UK investors and customers

For UK investors, two questions sharpen. First, how does the OpenAI listing interact with UK index inclusions and pension-fund exposure? At a £790bn target valuation, OpenAI would land as one of the largest US listings of the decade and would force UK passive funds tracking the S&P 500 and broader US indices to take meaningful exposure. Second, how does the simultaneous SpaceX filing — which disclosed Anthropic’s £930m monthly compute commitment — change how UK enterprise buyers think about supplier viability? OpenAI’s IPO prospectus will have to disclose its own compute-supplier concentration, and the market reaction will be informative for everyone evaluating frontier-lab dependencies.

IPOX vice president Kat Liu told Reuters that resolving the Musk litigation “removed a major obstacle” and that timing alongside SpaceX “takes some of the scrutiny off OpenAI and allows the company to tell its own story”. OpenAI raised £96bn ($122bn) earlier this year — likely Silicon Valley’s largest single funding round — and has revised its product roadmap twice in recent months under competitive pressure from Google and Anthropic. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers, OpenAI said earlier in the year, providing the consumer-revenue base any prospectus will lean on.

Looking forward

UK companies dependent on OpenAI for production AI workloads should expect more transparent disclosure of compute commitments, model-development costs, and customer concentration in the coming prospectus. Watch for whether OpenAI lists with a non-profit governance carve-out preserving any element of its founding structure, and how the FCA and PRA respond to UK financial-services firms holding pre-IPO exposure through private secondary markets. The £790bn valuation marker will set the benchmark every other AI-listing conversation through 2027 starts from.

Currency conversions use £1 = $1.27 at time of writing.

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