The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI intends to prepare itself for going public by the fourth quarter of this Year. After facing fierce competition from Anthropic, the company has now moved more quickly to pursue this goal. In an effort to achieve this goal, OpenAI is currently engaging in discussions with investment banks regarding a potential IPO and expanding its finance team. The new hires within the finance team are Ajmere Dale as chief accounting officer and Cynthia Gaylor as VP of corporate business finance and oversight of investor relations.
It is speculated that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for IPOs. OpenAI, along with its competitors, including SpaceX and Anthropic, are the closely monitored tech darlings that could go public.
However, completing an initial public offering before the year-end will be challenging for OpenAI, a quickly expanding technology company, due to the stresses associated with rapid growth. Recently, OpenAI has replaced most executives at the upper levels of management and faces increased competition in its basic business (consumers) from Google. As a result of these business conditions and events, it has recently declared a ‘code red’ and is now involved in litigation with co-founder Elon Musk, who has sued for almost $134 billion ($134,000 million) in damages against the company for alleged mismanagement.
An IPO can assist an AI startup in strengthening market confidence in finances and satisfy the concerns of investors about the costs involved in making chip deals and developing AI infrastructure, which are worth a hundred billion dollars.
Read: Trump to Announce Powell’s Successor as Fed Chair on Friday Morning
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, stated in one of the big technology podcasts that he is not excited and is annoyed about listing the technology company. Therefore, he is delegating some of the responsibilities to Fidgi Simo, former CEO of Instacart, who leads OpenAI’s product and business teams as the CEO of Applications.
According to sources, OpenAI executives have expressed concerns over Anthropic potentially beating OpenAI to an IPO. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, has stated to its financial partners that it is open to going public by the end of the year. The company is witnessing increasing sales due to its viral Coding Agent (Claude Code). Anthropic will likely be able to complete its current fundraising round in excess of $10 billion (which was its target).
Whichever company goes public first will have access to a wide pool of institutional and retail investors who want to gain exposure to the next wave of generative AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are also competing against Musk’s SpaceX, which plans an IPO as early as this summer and hopes to raise $1 trillion, according to those sources.
The owner of the Wall Street Journal, News Corp, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Anthropic has also engaged in discussions with banks interested in helping with the company’s IPO. Like Open AI, Anthropic has also hired finance personnel to help in making the company public.
Both companies are losing billions of dollars each year while building new AI models and powering their existing products. Anthropic is expected to reach breakeven for the first time in 2028, which is two years earlier than OpenAI, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The sources have further confirmed that OpenAI is in the throes of a fundraising campaign, most of which is occurring this year as a part of a pre-IPO round. It is striving to pull in at least $100 billion in a deal, valuing the startup at $830 billion. Softbank is planning to invest $30 billion in OpenAI, and the technology company is also discussing with Amazon to invest $50 billion. These negotiations are led by Jassy, the tech giant’s chief executive with OpenAI’s Sam Altman
