OpenAI has officially started the process of going public. The company filed a confidential S-1 registration statement with the SEC on June 8-9, 2026, kicking off what could become one of the most consequential tech IPOs since, well, pick your favorite.

The targeted valuation sits at roughly $1 trillion. Some reports peg the valuation above $850B with the potential to stretch to $1 trillion.

The details behind the filing

OpenAI has tapped Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to manage the offering. The timing window stretches from September 2026 into Q4 of the same year, giving the company flexibility depending on market conditions.

OpenAI has indicated it may elect to keep certain operations private even after going public.

One notable feature of the planned offering is a dedicated allocation for retail investors. Millions of people use ChatGPT daily.

A crowded race to the public markets

OpenAI isn’t filing in a vacuum. Anthropic, its closest rival in the foundation model space, filed for its own IPO approximately one week before OpenAI’s announcement. SpaceX has also been mentioned in the same wave of firms eyeing the public markets.

For OpenAI specifically, the timing also reflects its corporate evolution. The company began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, transitioned to a “capped profit” structure, and has since been restructuring toward a more conventional for-profit model.

The confidential S-1 filing means the full financial details, including revenue, costs, and profitability metrics, won’t be publicly available until OpenAI chooses to make them so, likely a few weeks before the actual listing.

What this means for investors

The retail allocation plan is worth watching closely. Tech IPOs have historically been dominated by institutional investors who capture most of the first-day gains. A token retail allocation of 1-2% of shares is a press release, not a paradigm shift.

For crypto-adjacent investors, the direct connection is limited. OpenAI’s IPO is a traditional equity play with no announced ties to any blockchain tokens or decentralized protocols. Some DeFi platforms, including Injective, have offered exposure to pre-IPO futures for companies like OpenAI, but those instruments carry their own set of risks, including liquidity concerns and the disconnect between synthetic exposure and actual equity ownership.

The competitive dynamic between OpenAI and Anthropic filing back-to-back also gives investors a rare opportunity: the ability to compare two direct competitors’ financials, growth rates, and business models in the public markets simultaneously.