OpenAI Also Files Confidentially for IPO, Setting Up Historic Dual AI Listing Race

OpenAI has also confidentially filed paperwork for its public listing, joining Anthropic in what is shaping up to be an unprecedented dual AI company IPO race in the second half of 2026. The ChatGPT maker most recently raised 122 billion in a March 2026 funding round at an 852 billion post-money valuation, a figure that has since been eclipsed by Anthropic's 965 billion valuation after its 65 billion Series H. OpenAI had been widely expected to be first to the public markets among frontier AI labs, but Anthropic's aggressive growth trajectory and confidential filing timeline has introduced genuine uncertainty about which company will debut first.

OpenAI's corporate structure has added complexity to its IPO preparation. The company has been undergoing a lengthy restructuring to transition away from its unusual hybrid nonprofit-capped-profit model toward a more conventional for-profit structure that can access public markets cleanly. That process has involved renegotiating agreements with the nonprofit board, addressing questions about governance and the relationship between the company's commercial operations and its stated safety mission, and navigating scrutiny from several state attorneys general. CEO Sam Altman has publicly committed to the IPO process while also dealing with a more personal note this week after his home was attacked.

For Wall Street, the dual listing of both companies would create the first publicly traded comparables set for frontier AI valuations, potentially grounding the sector's private market pricing and establishing benchmarks that would ripple across the broader AI investment landscape. Analysts at multiple banks have begun issuing research notes attempting to model the relative valuation cases for OpenAI and Anthropic on public markets, with significant variation in their estimates depending on assumptions about revenue growth trajectories, compute cost advantages, and the long-term market structure of AI model provision. The race to the market between the two leading AI labs is now among the most closely watched events in technology finance.