OpenAI filed a confidential S‑1 with the SEC on Monday, formally opening the door to an IPO. The company posted the filing publicly, noting it expects the document to leak and that no price or timetable has been set. Its move follows Anthropic’s public‑market filing just a week earlier, signaling a wave of AI firms testing the capital markets.

The filing comes after OpenAI’s latest fundraising pushed its valuation to $852 billion, while internal reports show annualized revenue of $25 billion as of February. Analysts warn the firm could burn roughly $115 billion through 2029 on compute and other costs, raising doubts about a clear path to profitability despite its dominant chatbot market share. Such scale makes the IPO one of the largest tech offerings in history.

OpenAI now faces intensified rivalry from Anthropic and Google, which unveiled Gemini 3 Pro last November and claims to have overtaken OpenAI on several benchmarks. Legal pressure also mounts after families of the Tumbler Ridge shooting sued the company for alleged safety‑system failures. With the S‑1 on file, OpenAI can choose to go public whenever the board judges the trade‑offs favorable.