OpenAI submits confidential S-1 to the SEC

OpenAI confirmed it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, a week after Anthropic disclosed the same step. Rather than wait for the filing to leak, the company announced it directly, saying “we expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it.” Chief financial officer Sarah Friar said the company’s most recent valuation, $852 billion, would place it among the fifteen largest companies in the S&P 500 were it public today.

The company gave no timeline for an actual listing and no detail on share price, structure or ticker — none of which is disclosed under a confidential filing, which the SEC reviews privately before any public registration. OpenAI said going public “may be a while because there are things we want to do that are easier as a private company,” framing the filing as optionality rather than a commitment to a near-term date. It disclosed no revenue or profitability figures alongside the filing, and continues to operate at a loss driven by infrastructure and compute spending.

The filing followed a legal win for OpenAI earlier in the year against Elon Musk, who had challenged the company’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit structure — a dispute that had been read as one obstacle to any future listing. With that resolved, both leading US frontier labs had, within a week of each other, taken the first procedural step toward public markets, without either fixing a date. Reports at the time speculated a listing could come as early as September 2026, though neither company confirmed a schedule, and a confidential filing carries no obligation to proceed.