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OpenAI files for blockbuster $850bn IPO

Published: June 9, 2026 at 7:53 am

Author: Jonathan Symcox

OpenAI has filed for an $850bn IPO.

The ChatGPT maker – led by Sam Altman – wrote in a blog post that it plans to go public on the US stock market in due course.

It would be one of the largest flotations in history.

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” it said. “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.”

Rival AI company Anthropic, behind Claude, said last week that it plans to go public.

OpenAI, which stunned the world when it released its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, became a for-profit company after starting life as a non-profit research lab in 2015.

It closed a funding round of $122bn in March which valued the company at around $852bn.

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