OpenAI files a week after Anthropic, and nobody can agree what it's worth

Right on cue, eight days after Anthropic, OpenAI announced on X it had submitted a confidential S-1. Same playbook, same secrecy, and a statement that was, by Silicon Valley standards, remarkably straight: 'We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it.' Credit where it's due — that's more self-aware than most IPO PR. The company also said it has 'not decided on timing' and that it 'may be a while'. The choreography of announcing while simultaneously saying 'probably not soon' is a very specific kind of optionality-preservation.

Reported targets run from ~$730B to ~$850B and some outlets push toward ~$1 trillion. That is a quarter-trillion-dollar spread on a single company in a single news cycle. The reason is simple: the filing is confidential, so reporters are triangulating from sources, and the numbers wander accordingly. The most defensible anchor is the March 2026 funding round — a $122B raise — which priced OpenAI at $852B; per reporting, CFO Sarah Friar has used that to say OpenAI would rank among the 15 largest S&P 500 companies. That round number is the disclosed, datable one. Everything above it is speculation with a byline.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the reported underwriters — with JPMorgan also named in some accounts. These are the banks that get paid more when the number prints higher, which is useful context for evaluating any rosy projections that surface as the prospectus process unfolds. That is not cynicism; it is just how IPO economics work, and ignoring it is how retail investors get surprised later.

Bloomberg has pegged the broader AI-IPO pipeline at roughly $3.6 trillion in aggregate. In a wave that big, being last to file is a positioning problem — you list into market exhaustion and on someone else's comparables. So both labs file early, keep their timing vague, say 'we'll go when the moment is right', and hold maximum flexibility. The public statement is 'the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best' (OpenAI's own words). The private translation is: we are watching the market, watching Anthropic, and we will move when it suits us, not when a schedule says to.

That $600 billion figure is the part of this story worth sitting with. Going public is not just about early investors cashing out — at this scale, it is about accessing the capital markets to fund a buildout that makes almost any previous tech infrastructure bet look modest. The IPO is, in a real sense, a financing mechanism for the next decade of compute. Which is why the 'we might wait a while' language tracks: you file to keep the option, you actually list when the rate environment, the market appetite, and your own readiness all align. Right now, one of those three is still in motion.