OpenAI confirmed on June 8 that it has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, formalizing what Reuters reported in May as a planned filing. The company is valued at $852 billion off the back of a $122 billion funding round closed in March. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, with a possible fall 2026 listing window. In a brief statement, OpenAI said the filing 'gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,' while acknowledging that 'there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.' ChatGPT now serves roughly 900 million weekly users.
An S-1, even a confidential one, locks in a number of disclosures that the AI industry has spent years arguing about privately. OpenAI will have to itemize training costs, customer concentration, the structure of its Microsoft revenue-share, the still-unusual arrangement between the for-profit company and its nonprofit parent, and the unit economics of inference at scale. Public reporting suggests OpenAI is running $25 billion in annualized revenue against a negative 122 percent non-GAAP operating margin — a combination that has no real precedent in major tech IPO history. Whether the S-1 confirms or revises that picture is the single most consequential financial disclosure the industry will see this year.
The filing arrives one week after Anthropic submitted its own confidential S-1 at a $965 billion valuation, and four days before SpaceX is expected to start its IPO roadshow. Three near-trillion-dollar listings in a single quarter is structurally new — the public markets have never had to absorb this much frontier-technology capacity at once. It also resets the competitive frame: OpenAI and Anthropic will be priced against each other in the open, with quarterly earnings cycles and analyst models, rather than against opaque private rounds. For Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — each of whom holds substantial economic exposure to one of the two labs — the next eighteen months will recast some of those relationships in public.
A note for learners: the most useful single document you can read about the AI industry this year will be OpenAI's eventual public S-1, followed by Anthropic's. Forget the keynotes and the demos — the prospectus is where a company is legally required to describe the risks it actually believes in. If you want to understand whether AI economics work, what concentration looks like, and where the regulatory exposure really sits, the S-1 is the source. Add a calendar reminder for the day either company flips its filing from confidential to public, and read it the moment it lands.