Business

OpenAI Confidentially Filed for an IPO

By Erica Coleman · June 11, 2026

Every major AI company has been private. The one that started all of this just filed to change that.

OpenAI confidentially submitted its IPO registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, according to CNBC, setting in motion what is expected to become the largest technology IPO in years. The company’s valuation in its most recent private funding round was approximately $300 billion — a figure that would make it one of the most valuable companies on any public exchange the moment it begins trading.

The filing is confidential, meaning the financial details of the offering — revenue, losses, share price, number of shares — will not be disclosed publicly until closer to the actual listing date. That date has not been announced. Sources familiar with the process told CNBC the company is targeting a public offering before the end of 2026.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab. Its original mission statement said it would develop AI “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” Its founding donors included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman. Musk left the board in 2018. The organization converted to a “capped-profit” structure in 2019, then restructured again in 2024 into a more conventional for-profit corporation — a transformation that generated lawsuits, board disputes, and the brief firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman in November 2023.

The company that was created to ensure AI would benefit everyone is now preparing to sell shares of itself to investors who expect it to generate returns.

OpenAI’s revenue has grown rapidly — reportedly exceeding $13 billion annually as of early 2026 — driven by its ChatGPT consumer product, enterprise API contracts, and licensing agreements with publishers and technology companies. It also burns cash at a historic rate. The computing infrastructure required to train and run its models costs billions annually, and the company has raised more than $30 billion in private capital since its founding.

Whether OpenAI is worth $300 billion on the public market depends on a question no one has answered yet: how much of the AI industry’s growth will be captured by a single company versus distributed across competitors including Google, Anthropic, Meta, and an expanding field of open-source alternatives.

The filing is in. Wall Street will decide the rest.