The AI industry is barrelling towards the public stock market as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI joins its rivals Anthropic and SpaceX in pursuing a US initial public offering.

Early Tuesday morning, OpenAI casually disclosed its long-awaited move to the public market on social media platform X.

“We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company wrote.

The AI giant, which was recently valued at US$852 billion, said it hadn’t decided on a timeline.

“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.”

The company’s initial public offering (IPO) was filed confidentially, and finer details such as a precise valuation had not been publicly disclosed at the time of writing.

According to a Reuters report from late 2025, however, people familiar with the matter said the company was working towards a valuation of up to US$1 trillion.

Though an OpenAI spokesperson at the time said an IPO was “not our focus” and the company’s chief financial officer forecasted a 2027 listing, sources said the stock launch could instead arrive in the second half of 2026.

OpenAI was been contacted for comment but did not respond prior to publication.

‘ChatGPT, should I invest in OpenAI or Anthropic?’

OpenAI’s IPO came as little surprise to the industry – in fact, consumers on prediction markets have been wagering whether the ChatGPT-maker or rival AI giant Anthropic would be the first to file an IPO since at least May.

Rival company SpaceX was first to break news of a public offer, with the company pursuing a world-first US$75 billion offering at a US$1.75 trillion valuation.

Although the Elon Musk-owned company is predominantly known for spacecrafts and astronautics, the company acquired xAI and its proprietary Grok AI models in February – some three months before it officially filed to go public.

SpaceX’s valuation is partially based on its ownership of xAI, as well as Musk’s promises to develop spaceborne AI data centres to handle the future energy and compute needs of the industry.

Anthropic followed suit with a confidential filing earlier this month – just days after it overtook OpenAI with a reported valuation of US$965 billion.

Information Age understands this valuation was largely underpinned by its increasingly popular, developer-favoured Claude chatbot, and its forthcoming Mythos AI model.

Mythos – which reportedly promises to reshape cybersecurity due to its unprecedented capacity for vulnerability hunting – is currently being previewed to limited organisations and governments, including in Australia.

SpaceX and Anthropic were contacted about OpenAI’s IPO, but did not respond prior to publication.

Microsoft and Musk changes precede IPO

Notably, OpenAI’s announcement followed a renegotiation of its long-running partnership with Microsoft.

While OpenAI has secured billions in investment from Microsoft since 2019, Microsoft announced in late April it would stop paying OpenAI a revenue share, and had made its license to OpenAI’s models and products non-exclusive.

Musk’s recent defeat in his legal challenge against OpenAI may have removed a source of investor concern that could otherwise have hindered plans for a public listing.

A race to the truth

The trio’s race to a public listing comes as the AI industry faces mounting concerns over a looming, economically disastrous ‘AI bubble’.

An Australian economist – who preferred to remain unnamed – explained to Information Age that much of the AI investment boom has been funded by ‘vendor finance’: a cyclical arrangement where chipmakers such as Nvidia lend finances to AI companies in order to secure further commerce.

With other key investments coming from private credit, Information Age was told IPOs could indicate the industry is trying to reduce its exposure by seeking new investment in the public market.

Indeed, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in October that going public was “the most likely path for us, given the capital needs that we'll have”, while economic strains on AI usage have recently driven a surge in user pricing.

Niusha Shafiabady, director of Women in AI for Social Good lab at Australian Catholic University said while AI has already proven itself a useful technology and it would be “too simplistic” to describe the whole sector as a bubble, the public listings may test “whether the market believes these companies can turn powerful AI capability into sustainable financial value”.

“The market would ask: Is the revenue real? Are customers willing to keep paying? Are the compute and energy costs manageable? Is the company defensible against competitors? Can it become profitable at this scale?” said Shafiabady.

“In that sense, a public listing would be a reality check not for AI as a technology, but for AI as a trillion-dollar business model.”