OpenAI submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC on Monday, the third major AI developer in two weeks to queue up for a Wall Street debut and, between it, Anthropic, and SpaceX, the anchor of a roughly $3.6 trillion IPO pipeline now hanging over public markets.

The filing didn’t leak so much as preempt itself. “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” the company said in a blog post, a sentence that captures the strange position OpenAI now occupies: a private company managing public-company narrative risk before it has public-company disclosure obligations. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are working on the listing, per Bloomberg, with CNBC reporting a target as soon as Q4 at a post-money valuation north of $850 billion.

The numbers underneath are doing several jobs at once. OpenAI closed a $122 billion financing round at the end of March at an $852 billion valuation, booked more than $20 billion in annual recurring revenue for 2025, and has roughly tripled revenue each year since 2023. It also projects, per internal documents, a $14 billion loss in 2026 and no profitability until 2029. A listing at this level would slot OpenAI among the 15 largest companies in the S&P 500.

That tension, hyperscale growth paired with hyperscale losses, is what the S-1 will eventually have to narrate. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, told CNBC in April that it was “good hygiene” for a business of OpenAI’s size to “look and feel and act” like a public company. Translation: the operational discipline of an IPO is being framed as a maturity milestone, not a capital event.

The competitive backdrop sharpens the timing. Anthropic filed its own confidential S-1 last week, off a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation; SpaceX is expected to debut around $1.75 trillion. Fortune described this as a “precarious moment,” with OpenAI losing its early lead with consumers and businesses to Google and Anthropic, even as ChatGPT carries roughly 900 million weekly active users.

Three trillion dollars of AI exposure is about to become legible to index funds. The 2029 profitability line is the part the prospectus will have to sell.

Sources