OpenAI plans to go public, intensifying investment race with Anthropic

OpenAI has revealed plans to sell shares to the public through a stock listing in the US.

The artificial intelligence (AI) company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT said on Monday that it had made a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to pursue an initial public offering (IPO) at some point in the future.

"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," the company said in a statement.

OpenAI's decision had been expected for months, but the company's filing comes exactly one week after rival AI firm Anthropic said it was planning to go public, too.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic's plans to list on the stock market follow that of SpaceX, the Elon Musk company set to debut on the Nasdaq on Friday at what the company expects to be a price per share that will value the company at $1.75tn (£1.3tn).

But OpenAI and Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, are more focused on AI work and they have been fierce rivals essentially since Dario Amodei co-founded the latter company five years ago.

He did so after leaving OpenAI over disagreements with Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI.

Today, the companies compete for users, corporate customers, investors, and have in recent months been jockeying with private valuations inching toward $1tn.

OpenAI's most recent valuation from private investors came in at $852bn. Anthropic's most recent valuation hit $965bn.

The companies now will be competing as to who might debut on the public stock market first - as neither have said exactly when this could occur.

Just last week, Altman said in an interview with CNBC that he was in no rush to take OpenAI public, and that he would do it "when it makes sense".

In its statement on Monday, OpenAI said it was revealing its IPO plans because "we expect it to leak".

The company noted that revealing its plans and its decision to go public "is a complicated set of tradeoffs".

Having filed the necessary paperwork for review with the SEC, the company says it now has "the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best".

For OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, which also owns the controversial AI chatbot Grok, selling shares to the public is like to give them billions of dollars in capital.

One of the most costly aspects of running an AI company is what is referred to as "compute," which typically describes the infrastructure and processing power required to build, train, test and then make available its offerings to the public, such as a chatbot.

OpenAI's compute costs are estimated to be over $100 billion dollars a year, while its revenue, the money it actually makes from its business, is a fraction of that.

SpaceX is also far from a profitable business.

Anthropic, however, has told investors that it expects to turn a profit in the first half of this year, as it says sales of its Claude product and related services have grown significantly.

After going public, each company will have to share with the public an accounting of its business performance each quarter.