OpenAI, perhaps the best-known company in the booming artificial intelligence market, filed confidentially on Monday for an initial public offering. Although there's no date yet for the company's public offering, this is a much-anticipated move, and according to The New York Times, an OpenAI IPO "could be one of the largest public offerings to hit Wall Street."

"We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," OpenAI said in a statement posted on X on Monday afternoon. "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. But it's a complicated set of trade-offs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

Filing confidentially means that, while OpenAI has likely begun the IPO process and submitted documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the details remain private. It's different from a public filing, where the company's prospectus and financial information are available for investors to review.

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (Musk left the company's board in 2018 and later sued Altman, in a trial that ended in Altman's favor just last month.) In 2022, the company released ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot based on large language model technology. Few apps have expanded as rapidly as ChatGPT, which amassed hundreds of millions of users in record time and has become, to many people, shorthand for AI chatbots.

The IPO will be closely watched, as investors weigh whether Altman's own warnings about an AI bubble are correct.

If OpenAI goes public, it would join a slate of high-profile IPOs expected this year, including Musk's SpaceX as well as Anthropic, OpenAI's major rival in artificial intelligence.

The rush toward IPOs shows, in part, how eager investors are to turn massive AI bets into profits, while companies push to raise the huge sums they need to keep going. AI is an expensive business, with costs driven by the computing power needed to train large language models and the data centers, chips and power infrastructure required to run them. 

Public debut risks

An OpenAI IPO would be a pivotal and high-stakes milestone. So far, the AI industry has largely been driven by speculation, with valuations tied more to future promise than current earnings. An online tracker of frontier AI companies' revenues and losses shows that AI development has cost more than twice what it has generated so far, suggesting billions of dollars in debt.

OpenAI's exact debt is hard to pin down precisely because it's a private company. Some reports say its partners and infrastructure backers have taken on roughly $96 billion in debt to support the AI buildout, and some estimates say OpenAI has made about $1.4 trillion in long-term compute and energy commitments.

Though OpenAI's widespread brand recognition and products could drive strong investor demand and support a high stock price, going public also exposes the company to scrutiny over its high operating costs and lack of profitability.  

Greater financial transparency will also subject OpenAI to increased regulatory oversight, potentially exposing legal, privacy or copyright-related challenges.

Some critics point to a mismatch between optimistic projections for AI growth and the current economic reality. An OpenAI IPO could require investors to price in substantial future expansion despite these uncertainties. Overall, the IPO race could serve as a broader stress test to determine if the AI industry is actually based on a durable business model.