OpenAI Plans to Secretly Submit IPO Application in the Near Future, Valuation Reaches $852 Billion

According to the Wall Street Journal, leading global artificial intelligence company OpenAI is preparing its prospectus with the assistance of top investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, planning to secretly submit IPO (initial public offering) documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently, and lock in a formal listing in September this year. In its latest round of financing, OpenAI's valuation has surged to $852 billion, a record-breaking scale that means its listing process will deeply reshape the global technology capital market landscape.

This week, OpenAI just won a lawsuit against its co-founder Elon Musk, who accused it of "deviating from its non-profit original intention and turning to profit-driven commercialization." Although Musk plans to appeal, this has temporarily cleared a major legal obstacle on OpenAI's IPO path.

However, behind the massive valuation and capital frenzy, OpenAI also faces significant internal and external challenges. From an internal operation perspective, the company has failed to meet its set revenue and user growth targets, exposing the real bottlenecks in the commercialization of generative AI. At the same time, the external competitive environment is rapidly deteriorating. Not only are big model rivals like Anthropic and hard tech giants like SpaceX also plotting IPOs to compete for capital liquidity, but technological competition is also becoming increasingly urgent. For example, Cursor's newly released Composer 2.5 has reached the benchmark level of Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 at an extremely low cost, while the rise of open-source models like Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek Code is continuously diluting OpenAI's once absolute technical barriers.

Industry analysts believe that OpenAI's accelerated push for the IPO strategy aims to establish an absolute financial moat during the period of technological dividends, to cope with the extreme hunger for billions of computing power required for large model training and R&D. As the absolute trendsetter of the AI industry, OpenAI's listing is not only a final test of its own business model sustainability, but also marks the beginning of the global generative AI industry's transition from "capital-raising financing" to "self-validation in the secondary market."