OpenAI has officially submitted a draft IPO filing to the SEC, marking a pivotal step toward entering the public capital markets. Founded in 2015, OpenAI has transitioned from a nonprofit organization to a commercial powerhouse, introducing a profit-cap structure in 2019 and completing its restructuring as a public benefit corporation by the end of 2025. Facing financial pressure—annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in January, yet projected losses of $14–25 billion in 2026—going public has become an essential move to sustain its research and development investments. CEO Sam Altman published a vision letter outlining the core strategic goal of "providing personal AGI to every person on Earth." With OpenAI and Anthropic both launching their IPO processes, global capital markets will soon deliver a large-scale "vote" on the future of general artificial intelligence.
Author and source: AIBase
The competitive landscape in the field of artificial intelligence is undergoing a dramatic shift. Following Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, secretly filing a draft S-1 a week ago, OpenAI has now officially submitted its IPO draft to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), marking a crucial step toward entering the public capital markets.
Although OpenAI hinted in its announcement that operating as a private company previously offered advantages, the company has decided to initiate its IPO process after weighing the pros and cons in today’s highly competitive business environment. Unlike its competitors’ calm announcements, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, followed up with a lengthy vision piece titled “Built to benefit everyone: our plan,” reaffirming the company’s original mission to “build AI that benefits everyone” and establishing “providing personal AGI to every person on Earth” as its core strategic goal.
Reviewing OpenAI’s trajectory, it has been a complex struggle to transition from its original nonprofit mission to a commercial powerhouse. From its purely nonprofit structure at inception in 2015, to the introduction in 2019 of a capped-profit operating model, and finally to the complete restructuring by the end of 2025—where the for-profit entity was reorganized as OpenAI Group, a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), and the original nonprofit parent became the OpenAI Foundation, holding approximately 26% of the shares—this series of structural changes reflects both a compromise to secure funding for the insatiable demands of computing power and a balance between commercial ambition and social responsibility.
According to public data, OpenAI’s commercialization has progressed at an extraordinary pace, with its annualized revenue surpassing $20 billion as of January this year. However, supporting this technology comes with an equally staggering rate of spending. Multiple estimates suggest that OpenAI’s loss gap could reach $14 to $25 billion by 2026. Faced with massive computational costs, leveraging capital markets has become an inevitable strategy to sustain long-term R&D investment.
Altman emphasized in the article that OpenAI will focus on three core goals in the future: first, building an "automated AI researcher" to collaborate with human researchers and accelerate breakthroughs in alignment technology; second, accelerating economic growth and scientific progress to ensure that the prosperity brought by AI is widely shared; and third, transforming advanced AI into personalized products accessible to everyone.
Industry analysts predict that as OpenAI and Anthropic enter the IPO process, the two leading AI unicorns are likely to both reach a market valuation of over $1 trillion following their listings. Behind this wave of IPOs is not only a direct clash between the top two AI companies, but also a large-scale “vote” by global capital markets on the future potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI).