OpenAI said Monday it has confidentially filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, queuing up the ChatGPT maker behind Anthropic and SpaceX in a three-deep parade of artificial-intelligence listings that could land before year-end. The San Francisco company, last valued at $852 billion, said it had not set a date and might wait. "We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," OpenAI said in a statement reported by CNBC.

The filing puts the three most valuable private AI bets in front of public investors in a span of weeks, just as the trade that fueled their valuations is showing cracks. South Korea's KOSPI tripped a circuit breaker Monday on a broad sell-off of AI chipmakers, and Broadcom's 12 percent slide last Thursday split the U.S. market between artificial-intelligence stocks and the rest of it. OpenAI's bankers will have to price a debut into that tape.

What was filed

A confidential submission lets a company hand its financials to the SEC for review before they reach prospective investors. OpenAI said the move "gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best," while warning that "it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company." CNBC reported the company has been gearing up to go public as soon as the fourth quarter.

Alongside the filing, OpenAI plans a tender offer that will let employees sell shares at the $852 billion valuation set in late March, a person familiar with the plans told CNBC. The transaction is meant to ease near-term pressure for liquidity. OpenAI has raised more than $180 billion and is still burning cash to secure compute and build out infrastructure.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are working with OpenAI on the filing, CNBC reported. The two banks sit atop SpaceX's prospectus as well.

On the Street

SpaceX is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday at a fixed $135 a share, a $1.77 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise that would make it the largest stock-market listing ever recorded. Anthropic filed its confidential prospectus on June 1 after closing a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, edging past OpenAI on paper. CNBC reported that depending on how SpaceX is received, Anthropic and OpenAI "could be rushing to beat each other out" given the capital each is trying to raise.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC in April that it was "good hygiene" for a company of OpenAI's size to "look and feel and act" like a public company. She declined to specify a timeline.

In a blog post Monday, Chief Executive Sam Altman framed the filing as the start of what he called "the third phase of OpenAI," after the research phase and a product phase. "The economy is beginning to reshape around AI," he wrote. "The central question now is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it."

A safety pitch

Altman paired the IPO message with a call for an international body to "coordinate leading AI efforts to reduce catastrophic risk," including "slowing frontier development when needed," Semafor reported. Anthropic said an option to "slow or temporarily pause" research would be wise. The language echoes warnings this year from Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and his Google DeepMind counterpart that a slower pace would be safer, but that neither lab could slow down on its own.

OpenAI has also been pruning at home. The company shuttered its short-form video app Sora and shifted investment into its enterprise business and Codex, the coding assistant that competes with Anthropic's Claude Code. Altman wrote on X in April that "feels like codex is having a chatgpt moment."

Musk in the picture

The filing arrives less than a month after a federal jury cleared OpenAI and Altman in a three-week trial brought by Elon Musk, who alleged the lab abandoned its nonprofit roots. An advisory jury said Musk, who first sued in 2024, waited too long to bring the claim; the federal judge adopted the verdict. Musk wrote on X that the judge and jury "never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality." The Washington Examiner reported Musk will appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling "creating a precedent to loot charities" destructive to charitable giving.

SpaceX's own filing names OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as "key competitors" in AI. SpaceX merged with Musk's xAI earlier this year.

The counterpoint

The Washington Examiner cast the announcement as a test of whether "investors are willing to stomach yet another IPO in the industry amid fears of an AI bubble." OpenAI's own hedging gives the company an exit if the market turns. A bruised AI tape, an unsettled Musk appeal and a chief executive publicly arguing for global brakes on frontier research are not the conditions in which mega-cap debuts have historically priced at the top of their range.

What's next

SpaceX prices Friday on the Nasdaq. Anthropic and OpenAI now sit in SEC review with no set roadshow. CNBC reported OpenAI could move as early as the fourth quarter; the company said only it has reserved the option.