SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, (V7N) – ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Monday took the first step toward going public, one week after arch-rival Anthropic announced its own filing, as both companies look to raise the massive sums needed to expand. In a social media post, the Sam Altman-led company said it had confidentially submitted an S-1 registration statement to US securities regulators but has "not decided on timing yet" for any potential debut.

OpenAI's move follows a confidential filing by Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, which announced last Monday that it had taken the same step. "It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company," OpenAI said, while noting the filing gives it "the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

Founded in San Francisco in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab by Altman, Elon Musk, and others, OpenAI burst into the mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The company has since restructured as a for-profit corporation and has grown into one of the world's most valuable private companies. Training and running cutting-edge AI models require billions of dollars in computing infrastructure, forcing both OpenAI and Anthropic to spend heavily on data centre capacity and chips.

Anthropic, valued at $965 billion following a $65 billion fundraising round, has positioned itself as a safety-focused rival to OpenAI in the generative AI race. OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in March, putting it behind Anthropic by that measure heading into what analysts say could be a landmark period for AI listings. Both companies appear set to follow Elon Musk's SpaceX to Wall Street.

OpenAI acknowledged the decision to go public involves "a complicated set of tradeoffs" but said the filing preserves its flexibility. The company said it decided to get ahead of the news, predicting the document would surface regardless. "We expect it to leak, so we're just announcing it," OpenAI said. SpaceX, which absorbed Musk's xAI lab, could see shares begin trading as early as Friday, targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion.

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