OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in the fourth quarter of this year, people familiar with the matter said, accelerating its plans as competition with rival Anthropic intensifies.
The $500 billion startup is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks about a potential public listing, people familiar with the matter said, and is growing its finance team. That includes the hire of a new chief accounting officer, Ajmere Dale, and a new corporate business finance officer, Cynthia Gaylor, who will oversee investor relations.
It is expected to be a blockbuster year for stock-market debuts after a recent drought, with some on Wall Street speculating that 2026 could be the biggest year ever for IPOs. OpenAI, rival Anthropic and SpaceX are among the most closely watched tech darlings that could go public, though listing activity has also picked up for smaller companies.
Pulling off a successful public listing by the end of the year is likely to be a difficult task for the ChatGPT maker, which is still experiencing the challenges of a fast-growing startup. The company has recently made changes to leadership ranks and is contending with increasingly fierce competition to its core consumer business from Google, prompting it to declare a weekslong code red. OpenAI is also headed to trial in a case brought by co-founder Elon Musk, who is seeking up to $134 billion in damages.
An IPO could help the AI startup shore up market confidence in its finances after investors questioned how it would pay for AI infrastructure and chips deals that total hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years.
“Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%. Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying,” Chief Executive Sam Altman said on the Big Technology podcast in December. He is expected to delegate some of the responsibilities of such a job to former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, who leads OpenAI’s product and business teams as its CEO of Applications.
OpenAI executives have privately expressed concerns about Anthropic beating the company to an IPO, people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI leaders, has told financial partners that it is open to listing by the end of this year. The startup’s sales are soaring, thanks largely to the popularity of its viral coding agent Claude Code, and it is in the process of raising a funding round that will likely exceed an initial $10 billion target, people familiar with the matter said.
Whichever company lists first will likely benefit from a large group of public market investors, including individual investors, who want exposure to the new wave of generative AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are also competing against Musk’s SpaceX, which is aiming to IPO as early as the summer and hoping to raise more than $1 trillion, people familiar with the matter said.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Anthropic has also held talks with banks interested in helping with the company’s IPO, people familiar with the matter said. It has also made a string of finance hires to potentially help take the company public. They include Andrew Zloto, who leads capital markets, and Blackstone investor Kevin Chang, people familiar with the matter said. Chang’s hire hasn’t been previously reported.
OpenAI and Anthropic are both losing billions of dollars every year as they work to build new AI models and power their existing products. Anthropic expects to break even for the first time in 2028, according to projections shared with investors last year. That is two years earlier than OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
OpenAI is in the throes of a fundraising campaign that could take place for much of this year, in what could be a pre-IPO round. It is seeking to pull together more than $100 billion in a deal that would value the startup at $830 billion.
SoftBank is discussing investing about $30 billion, the Journal reported, and OpenAI has had discussions with Amazon.com for an investment of as much as $50 billion. Andy Jassy, the tech giant’s chief executive, is personally leading negotiations with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the Journal reported Thursday.
Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com, Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@wsj.com and Kate Clark at kate.clark@wsj.com