The competitive landscape in the field of artificial intelligence is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Following the recent secret submission of an S-1 draft by Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, OpenAI has also officially submitted an IPO application draft to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), taking a crucial step toward entering the public capital market.

Although OpenAI implied in its announcement that operating as a non-public company had previously offered advantages, after weighing the pros and cons, the company still decided to proceed with the IPO process. Unlike the calm tone of its competitors' announcements, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman subsequently published an article titled "Built to benefit everyone: our plan," reiterating the company's original mission to build AI for all humanity, and setting the core strategic goal of providing personal AGI to every person on Earth.

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Looking back at OpenAI's development trajectory, it has been a complex game of transitioning from a non-profit origin to a commercial giant. From its initial purely non-profit structure when founded in 2015, to introducing a profit-limited business model in 2019, and finally completing a complete restructuring by the end of 2025—reorganizing the profit-making entity into OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation (PBC), while the original non-profit parent body became the OpenAI Foundation, holding about 26% of the shares. These structural changes were both compromises made by the company to access the "bottomless pit" of computing power funding, and a result of balancing its commercial ambitions with social responsibilities.

According to public data, OpenAI's commercial progress has been extremely rapid, with its annualized revenue exceeding $20 billion in January of this year. However, behind this technology lies an equally astonishing rate of spending. According to multiple estimates, OpenAI's loss gap could reach between $14 billion and $25 billion in 2026. Faced with the huge cost of computing power, relying on the capital market has become an inevitable choice for maintaining long-term R&D investment.

Altman emphasized in the article that OpenAI will focus on three core goals in the future: First, to create an "automated AI researcher," enabling AI to collaborate with researchers for iterative progress and accelerate breakthroughs in alignment technology; second, to accelerate economic development and promote scientific advancement, ensuring that the prosperity brought by AI can be widely shared; and finally, to transform advanced AI into personalized products accessible to everyone.

Industry predictions suggest that as OpenAI and Anthropic both enter the IPO process, these two top-tier unicorn companies in the AI industry are likely to reach a trillion-dollar valuation scale after their listings. This wave of listings not only represents a direct confrontation between the two leading AI companies but also serves as a large-scale "vote" by the global capital market on the future prospects of general artificial intelligence (AGI).