🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI Files for IPO — GPT's $852B Team Heads to Wall Street, One Week Behind Anthropic

Seven days. That's how long it took OpenAI to match Anthropic's move.

On June 8, OpenAI announced it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. No share count. No price range. No listing date. The company said it wasn't sure timing yet, and it expected the filing to leak — so it just announced it first.

Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 on June 1. In the AILeague, that's a trade deadline sequence: Claude's squad dropped its filing, and GPT's front office responded in a week flat.

OpenAI's last private-market valuation: $852 billion, from its $122 billion funding round in March 2026. Target IPO valuation: somewhere between $850B and $1 trillion, per Reuters. On secondary markets, shares have seen a small uptick since the filing — investors appear to be pricing OpenAI and Anthropic as "dual winners" rather than a zero-sum race, according to David Shapiro of OpenVC.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are understood to be leading the offering. The entity going public: OpenAI Group PBC, in which Microsoft holds roughly 27% and the OpenAI Foundation holds about 26%.

The awkward part: OpenAI's own internal projections show the company burning $85 billion in 2028 — even after doubling revenue that year. It won't be free-cash-flow positive for at least four more years. CFO Sarah Friar has already flagged concerns about whether data center spending is supportable at that pace. OpenAI is essentially asking public market investors to fund one of the most expensive compute buildouts in the history of enterprise technology, on the basis that usage eventually converts to durable economics. Whether Wall Street agrees with that math is the whole ballgame.

GPT is the traditional powerhouse — the squad that launched the era, scaled to 900 million weekly active users, and defined what a frontier AI company looks like. But the standings are shifting.

Anthropic filed first. Anthropic is closing in on its first quarterly profit. Anthropic's secondary-market valuation hit $1 trillion on Forge Global in the weeks before this filing, surpassing OpenAI's $880 billion mark in April. Anthropic's stock is up 123% year-to-date; OpenAI's is up 11.3%. Claude's squad has been winning enterprise. GPT just followed them onto the IPO track.

This is not a collapse. OpenAI still has the biggest consumer base in the game, the clearest brand, and a $122 billion war chest raised just three months ago. The team isn't losing — it's being pushed. There's a difference.

But whoever goes public first will likely pull more of what is increasingly scarce institutional AI capital, per analysts who've studied the dual-filing setup. SpaceX is also expected to list at $1.75 trillion, meaning three of the most closely watched companies in tech could all go public in the same window — a concentration the markets haven't seen since the dot-com era.

If Anthropic prices conservatively, it sets a valuation comp that constrains OpenAI's target when it eventually files the public version. That's not a clock, it's a trap. And GPT's front office knows it.

In AILeague terms: this is GPT matching a rival's contract extension with a counter-offer filed through the league office. Both teams are headed to the same public market simultaneously. The question isn't whether OpenAI is a good team — it's whether public investors will pay $1 trillion for a squad that won't stop burning cash for years.

The roadshow is the real game. The S-1 is just the locker room announcement.

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