OpenAI Files Confidential IPO With SEC

What Happened

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, filed confidentially for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8, according to a report from TradingKey. The confidential filing marks a formal step toward a public market debut for one of the most closely watched private technology companies in the world.

Background

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory before restructuring into a capped-profit company to attract outside investment. The company launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and the product reached 100 million users within two months, making it one of the fastest-growing consumer applications on record. OpenAI has since raised multiple funding rounds at escalating valuations, with its most recent reported valuation reaching approximately $300 billion following a funding round earlier in 2025.

Sam Altman serves as chief executive officer. The company's investors include Microsoft, which has committed more than $13 billion to OpenAI and integrated its models into products including the Bing search engine, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft 365.

OpenAI's core products include the GPT series of large language models, the DALL-E image generation system, the Sora video generation model, and the o-series reasoning models. The company also operates an enterprise API business used by thousands of companies to build AI-powered applications.

The Filing Process

A confidential IPO filing, formally known as a draft registration statement submitted under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, allows a company to initiate the regulatory review process with the SEC before making its financial disclosures public. Companies that meet certain criteria can use this route to assess regulatory feedback privately before committing to a public offering timeline.

The filing does not establish a date for the IPO, a share price range, or a target amount to be raised. Those details are typically disclosed in a subsequent public filing of the S-1 registration document, which must be made available to investors at least 15 days before a roadshow begins.

What It Means in Practice

A public listing would require OpenAI to disclose detailed financial information, including revenue figures, operating costs, and profitability metrics, that the company has not previously made available to the public. OpenAI has reported that its annualized revenue reached $3.4 billion in early 2024, with projections circulated in investor materials suggesting higher figures for 2025, though those projections have not been independently verified.

The company's move toward a public offering also comes amid ongoing corporate restructuring. OpenAI announced plans in late 2024 to convert its capped-profit subsidiary into a standard for-profit public benefit corporation, a transition that has involved negotiations with its nonprofit parent board and, separately, with investors including Microsoft over equity terms.

The AI sector has attracted significant investor attention, with competitors including Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral also operating as private companies at high valuations. A successful OpenAI IPO would represent one of the largest technology listings in recent years and would establish a public market benchmark for AI model developers as a category.

NVIDIA, whose chips power a large share of AI model training and inference workloads globally, has a market capitalisation exceeding $3 trillion, reflecting broader investor appetite for AI infrastructure and application companies.

What Comes Next

OpenAI is expected to file a public version of its S-1 registration statement with the SEC at a later date, at which point detailed financial disclosures will become available to prospective investors and the general public.