OpenAI Confirms Confidential IPO Filing, With Big Stakes for the AI Boom

Source Domain: www.cnet.com

OpenAI, perhaps the best-known company in the booming artificial intelligence market, filed confidentially on Monday for an initial public offering. Although there’s no date yet for the company’s public offering, this is a much-anticipated move, and according to The New York Times, an OpenAI IPO “could be one of the largest public offerings to hit Wall Street.”

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” OpenAI said in a statement posted on X on Monday afternoon. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Filing confidentially means that, while OpenAI has likely begun the IPO process and submitted documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the details remain private. It’s different from a public filing, where the company’s prospectus and financial information are available for investors to review.

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (Musk left the company’s board in 2018, and later sued Altman, in a trial that ended in Altman’s favor just last month.) In 2022, the company released ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot based on large language model technology. Few apps have expanded as rapidly as ChatGPT, which amassed hundreds of millions of users in record time and has become, to many people, shorthand for AI chatbots.

The IPO will be closely watched, as investors weigh whether Altman’s own warnings about an AI bubble are correct.

If OpenAI goes public, it would join a slate of…

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