OpenAI said to be targeting $1trn valuation in Wall Street flotation after Anthropic files for IPO
AI race hits public markets as OpenAI and Anthropic file for IPOs
The battle for artificial intelligence supremacy is moving from private markets to the public square, with both of the world’s leading AI labs filing for initial public offerings within weeks of each other. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, submitted a confidential S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2026 — a move the company itself announced, anticipating the leak. Its closest rival, Anthropic, filed its own confidential IPO paperwork on 1 June, targeting a valuation of approximately $965 billion after raising $65 billion in its last private round.
IPO filings and valuations
OpenAI is reportedly targeting a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion for its public debut, with some analysts expecting the figure to exceed $1 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, with JPMorgan also named as a lead underwriter. While a listing as early as September 2026 has been discussed internally, OpenAI has stated that the timing is undecided and could take a while, noting that some strategic objectives are “easier as a private company”. A tender sale of employee shares is also under consideration. Anthropic, meanwhile, filed on 1 June and is aiming for a valuation around $965 billion, having recently closed a $65 billion capital raise to bolster its position ahead of going public.
From non-profit lab to public benefit corporation
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and other researchers, including Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy and Durk Kingma. Altman and Musk co-chaired the company in its early years; Musk departed the board in 2018. The company began as a non-profit with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, then restructured into a capped-profit model and, in October 2025, into a Public Benefit Corporation — the structure under which it will go public. A significant legal obstacle was removed in May 2026 when a U.S. court dismissed Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging the shift from non-profit to capped-profit, clearing the way for the PBC restructuring and potential IPO.
Explosive growth, persistent losses
OpenAI has enjoyed extraordinary revenue growth since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. The company is generating approximately $2 billion in monthly revenue — an annualised rate of around $24 billion — and by June 2026 that figure had climbed to an annualised $25 billion, growing at four times the pace of Google and Meta at comparable revenue stages. ChatGPT now boasts more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers. The platform processes roughly 2.5 billion prompts per day, and monthly visits reached 5.51 billion in April 2026.
Yet despite this explosive top-line performance, OpenAI remains deeply unprofitable. The company is projecting a $14 billion loss for 2026 and does not expect to turn a profit before 2029 or 2030. Internal documents indicate that OpenAI expects to lose $44 billion between 2023 and the end of 2028, before finally generating a profit of $14 billion in 2029. The gap between revenue and profitability is driven by enormous infrastructure costs: the company plans to spend approximately $600 billion on AI infrastructure by 2030 — a downward revision from an earlier projection of $1.4 trillion — and already carries over $1 trillion in committed financial obligations to cloud providers and chipmakers.
Investors have nonetheless poured capital into the company. OpenAI closed its latest funding round in March 2026, securing $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion — the largest private financing in Silicon Valley history. That round followed a February 2026 round of $110 billion at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, anchored by Amazon ($50 billion), NVIDIA ($30 billion) and SoftBank ($30 billion). Other participants included Microsoft, a16z, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG and funds advised by T. Rowe Price, alongside more than $3 billion raised from individual investors through banking channels. Microsoft, a long-term partner, has invested over $13 billion since 2019, providing Azure cloud computing resources. Amazon, beyond its investment, is building a strategic partnership with OpenAI that includes custom AI model development — while also maintaining a significant relationship with Anthropic. SoftBank co-led a $500 billion valuation round in March 2025 and participated again in the February 2026 raise.
Intensifying competition
OpenAI may have ignited the generative-AI revolution, but it faces mounting pressure on multiple fronts. Anthropic, its closest rival, has seen its annualised revenue run rate surpass OpenAI’s, reaching $30 billion in April 2026, with approximately 85% of that coming from enterprise and developer customers. Claude, Anthropic’s model, has gained significant traction for coding and reasoning applications. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, gained attention in early 2025 for building competitive frontier models at a fraction of U.S. compute costs. The company is reportedly seeking to raise $3–4 billion at a $50 billion valuation, according to earlier reports, and more recently is said to be targeting $7.4 billion at a valuation between $52 billion and $59 billion, with investors including Tencent, CATL, NetEase and JD.com. Elon Musk’s xAI has raised approximately $12 billion, according to earlier disclosures, and more recently completed a Series E round of approximately $20 billion that values the company at over $100 billion, with funds earmarked for Grok development and infrastructure expansion. The company has faced controversy over its Grok chatbot generating inappropriate content. Google’s Gemini and DeepMind continue to compete across consumer AI, enterprise applications and frontier model research; Gemini’s app has surpassed 750 million monthly active users and 2 billion monthly web visits.
Despite ChatGPT’s dominant user numbers, its relative position is slipping. ChatGPT’s web traffic market share fell from 86.7% in January 2025 to 56.7% by March 2026, while its U.S. mobile app daily active user share dropped below 40% in the same month, as Gemini and Claude steadily gained ground.
The question for public market investors is not whether AI will transform industries. It is whether a company burning $14 billion a year, with profitability still four years away, deserves a valuation above $1 trillion. For now, Wall Street appears ready to find out.
