OpenAI / Wikimedia Commons OpenAI Filed Its S-1 Confidentially. Anthropic Did Too, a Week Earlier.
OpenAI announced on June 8 that it had submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC, taking the first formal step toward a public offering. The company preempted the expected leak by publishing the announcement itself. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the process.
OpenAI announced on June 8 that it had submitted a confidential S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclosed it preemptively, predicting that the filing would leak.
“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the statement read. “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 tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the process, with JPMorgan reported as a third underwriter. Reports from earlier this month point to a September-to-November 2026 listing window, with September cited as the earliest plausible target, but no date has been set publicly.
The Anthropic Connection
OpenAI’s filing came one week after Anthropic quietly submitted its own confidential S-1. Neither company has disclosed financials publicly. The back-to-back filings mean both of the largest US AI labs are now formally in the IPO queue at the same time.
The parallel timing puts two companies that compete directly on coding tools — OpenAI’s Codex and ChatGPT versus Anthropic’s Claude Code — into simultaneous public offering processes. That context will shape how institutional investors compare them once S-1s become public.
OpenAI’s current private valuation is reported at around $852 billion following a funding round earlier this year. Anthropic most recently raised at a $96.5 billion valuation in its Series H.
What’s Actually Changing
A confidential S-1 filing doesn’t mean a company is going public soon. It means the company has engaged with the SEC’s review process and wants the option to list without being forced into a specific timeline. The SEC reviews the filing privately, the company responds, and at some point it can choose to make the S-1 public — which starts the official IPO clock.
For OpenAI, a listing would require resolving ongoing questions about its corporate structure. The company spent the better part of the past year restructuring from a capped-profit LLC model toward a public benefit corporation structure, partly to facilitate a future public offering. That restructuring is complete enough to file, apparently, but the company is still signaling it’s not in a hurry.
The practical effect for developers and enterprises using OpenAI’s products is minimal in the short term. Codex, the API, and ChatGPT continue operating as normal regardless of the IPO process. What changes is the pressure toward quarterly reporting, public disclosure of product financials, and the specific kinds of decisions that become harder to make privately once Wall Street analysts are watching.