The creator of ChatGPT has submitted secret documents to federal regulators that could lead to the company going public on the stock market, joining two other major artificial intelligence firms in a rush toward Wall Street launches.
OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, announced Monday that it has submitted confidential documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company said in a written statement. “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.”
The submission comes after competitor Anthropic revealed on June 1 that it too is pursuing an initial public stock offering. Both companies are now joining Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX, which has begun promoting itself to investors as an AI-focused space enterprise.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially suggested the possibility of going public last fall, calling it the “most likely path” for the organization given its scale and need for enormous amounts of funding to develop its technology.
Starting in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on creating AI for public benefit, OpenAI has transformed into a company worth $852 billion.
The path toward public trading was cleared when OpenAI restructured its operations last year, converting to a public benefit corporation while still remaining under nonprofit oversight.
During an April interview, OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar would not provide a specific timeline for a possible IPO but noted the company was already “acting with the good hygiene of a public company,” including tracking revenue in ways that publicly traded companies must report to the SEC.
“I want us to be ready,” she told The Associated Press. “I think it’s good to be able to tap the public markets. They’re much bigger than the private markets if you believe compute is a competitive advantage.”
She noted that OpenAI’s current worth would place it among the 15 largest companies in the S&P 500.
She also mentioned there is a “credentializing moment of being a public company.”
“At that point, people are checking your balance sheet, the SEC is governing you and so on,” she said.
