AI giants' race to raise funds heats up as ChatGPT-owner plans stock market debut

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, the firm said Monday, joining a wave of heavyweight tech listings that includes rival Anthropic and Elon Musk's SpaceX [1]. The filing comes exactly one week after Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, disclosed its own plans to go public [1]. Neither company has specified a timeline. "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," OpenAI said in a statement [1]. SpaceX is set to debut on the Nasdaq on Friday, targeting a valuation of $1.75tn [1]. OpenAI's most recent private valuation reached $852bn, while Anthropic's hit $965bn as of May 2026 [1][11]. Both firms face enormous capital demands. OpenAI's annual compute costs are estimated to exceed $100bn, dwarfing its revenue [1]. Anthropic, by contrast, has told investors it expects to turn a profit in the first half of this year [1]. The two companies have been rivals since Dario Amodei left OpenAI over disagreements with chief executive Sam Altman and co-founded Anthropic in 2021 [1][11]. They now compete for users, corporate customers, and investors, with their private valuations inching toward the trillion-dollar mark in recent months [1]. Richard Crowley of Singapore Management University noted the interdependence of their public-market debuts. "We might typically think of OpenAI and Anthropic as competitors, but the fate of their financing is intrinsically intertwined through the public's perception of the generative AI space," he said [1]. The IPO wave arrives amid what analysts have described as an AI investment bubble [4]. The decade has seen generative AI applications such as ChatGPT become widespread, enabling users to instantly produce sophisticated text, images, and media [4]. That growth has been accompanied by escalating infrastructure costs. Sunil Krishnan of Aviva Investors said the firms have a "vast need for cash" and that "no-one wants to be last" to go public [1]. By listing, OpenAI will face new disclosure requirements around its financials and product pipeline. Crowley noted that IPOs can deter private funding and slow deal-making because companies must reveal more information [1]. OpenAI acknowledged the tradeoffs, saying it filed now because "we expect it to leak" and that it now has "the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best" [1]. Anthropic, meanwhile, has faced its own pressures. Since January 2026, the company has been in conflict with the US Department of Defense over the use of its products for military purposes and mass domestic surveillance [10]. The dispute adds a layer of scrutiny as both firms prepare for public-market debuts that will test investor appetite for generative AI companies at near-trillion-dollar valuations [1].