OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, targeting a valuation above $1 trillion and aiming for a public listing as early as September 2026, according to people familiar with the filing.

The company confirmed the confidential S-1 submission but did not disclose financial details. The filing came days after rival AI company Anthropic filed its own IPO paperwork and as SpaceX completed a landmark public offering that opened 19 percent higher on its first trading day, valuing the rocket company at $1.77 trillion.

OpenAI’s revenue has grown sharply. The company went from roughly $2 billion in annualized revenue at the end of 2023 to $6 billion in 2024, and its chief financial officer confirmed the figure surpassed $20 billion by the end of 2025. ChatGPT, the consumer product that put the company on the map in late 2022, has expanded into an enterprise software business, an API platform used by thousands of companies, and a hardware initiative with partners in Japan and Taiwan.

Despite the revenue growth, OpenAI does not expect to reach profitability until approximately 2030. Internal projections published in financial media suggest the company expects losses of around $14 billion in 2026 alone, driven by the cost of computing infrastructure and the ongoing expense of training frontier AI models. Investors in late-stage private funding rounds valued the company at $852 billion, and the IPO is expected to push that higher.

The company’s relationship with Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion and holds a significant stake, will be one of the more complex elements of the IPO filing to parse. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI models across its product suite, and the terms of that partnership affect how investors will model OpenAI’s standalone revenue potential.

OpenAI completed a conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure earlier this year, clearing a legal and governance hurdle that had complicated earlier discussions about a public offering. The nonprofit parent retains an oversight role and a stake in the for-profit entity, but the structure is now conventional enough for standard IPO mechanics to proceed.

The timing of OpenAI’s filing, so close to the SpaceX IPO and Anthropic’s filing, suggests the company sees a window in current market conditions that it wants to capture before the end of 2026. AI-related stocks have driven much of the S&P 500’s earnings growth in the first half of the year, and investor appetite for direct exposure to frontier AI companies has been difficult to satisfy through existing public market options. More on the AI and tech IPO wave, including SpaceX’s historic debut and Anthropic’s filing, is available in our technology section.

The SEC review period for a confidential filing is typically 30 to 60 days. If OpenAI receives comments and responds within that window, a September listing is achievable but tight. A delay into October or November would not be unusual for an IPO of this complexity and scale.

A successful OpenAI public offering at or above a $1 trillion valuation would make it one of the largest technology IPOs in history, alongside Saudi Aramco and Alibaba at their respective peaks. It would also create a new public benchmark for how markets value AI companies with large revenue but structural losses at scale.