OpenAI Files a Confidential S-1 One Week After Anthropic Beat It to Wall Street

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The two biggest AI labs in the world are now officially racing each other to the stock market, and the week they chose to start could not be more crowded.

Let's get into it.

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On Monday, June 8, OpenAI said it had submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the first formal step toward taking the company public. The announcement itself was unusual, because confidential filings are designed to stay quiet, but OpenAI said it expected the news to leak and chose to get ahead of the story with a short statement on its own website.

The company was careful to lower expectations on timing. It said it has not decided when a listing would happen, that it may be a while because some things are easier to do as a private company, and that the filing mainly gives it the option to go public sooner if that ends up being the best path. In other words, OpenAI wants the door open without committing to walking through it.

Anthropic Filed First and Took the Crown on the Way

The timing reads as a direct response to Anthropic, which disclosed its own confidential S-1 on June 1, exactly one week earlier. The Claude maker filed shortly after closing a Series H round of 65 billion dollars that valued the company at 965 billion dollars, a number that pushed it past the 852 billion dollar valuation OpenAI set in late March and made Anthropic the most valuable AI startup in the world.

That detail matters more than it might seem. For years the two companies have traded model releases, benchmark claims, and enterprise customers, but the scoreboard has always been private and fuzzy. Once both are public, the comparison becomes a daily stock price, and neither company wants to be the one that waited too long and listed into a colder market than its rival.

What a Confidential Filing Actually Buys You

A confidential S-1 lets a company hand its financials to regulators for private review before anything becomes public. The SEC reads the draft, sends back comments, and the company revises, all without competitors or investors seeing a single number. The figures only become public closer to the actual listing, when the company files a public version of the prospectus ahead of its roadshow.

For OpenAI, that privacy is the whole point right now. The company gets to start the regulatory clock and shape its own story while keeping revenue, margins, and losses hidden from rivals for a few more months. The tradeoff is that the clock, once started, creates expectations that are hard to walk back.

The Numbers OpenAI Will Eventually Have to Show

Going public would pull back the curtain on OpenAI's finances for the first time. The company said in March that it was generating 2 billion dollars in monthly revenue, an enormous figure that still sits alongside heavy losses driven by compute, talent, and infrastructure spending. A public OpenAI would have to disclose all of it, every quarter, and defend an 852 billion dollar valuation to investors who can sell the moment they stop believing.

Analysts have pointed out that at its current valuation, OpenAI would rank among the fifteen largest companies in the S&P 500 the day it lists. That is an extraordinary debut for a company that has never published an income statement, and it puts real pressure on Sam Altman to convince the market that long-term prospects justify the price despite the red ink.

SpaceX Is Already Pitching Itself as an AI Company

The third player in this story is SpaceX, which owns Elon Musk's xAI and started its own IPO roadshow last week. The rocket company is pitching itself to investors as an AI-focused space business, and its filing names OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as key competitors in artificial intelligence.

That framing tells you where the money is. Three of the largest private companies on the planet are heading to public markets in the same window, and all three are selling the same underlying thesis, which is that compute, models, and the infrastructure behind them will define the next decade of the economy. How investors receive the first listing will shape how aggressively the other two move.

Altman Published His Manifesto the Same Day

Hours around the filing announcement, Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay laying out OpenAI's plan for making AI benefit everyone. The piece opens with the image of electricity reaching rural American towns in the 1920s, arguing that the deepest impact of a transformative technology comes from the new possibilities it opens as access spreads.

The essay sets out three big goals for the company, which are building an automated AI researcher, accelerating economic growth, and giving everyone on Earth a personal AGI. Reading it next to the S-1 announcement, it is hard not to see the essay as the narrative half of the IPO pitch, a story about civilizational benefit published on the same day the company started the paperwork to sell shares in it.

The Bottom Line

OpenAI and Anthropic spent years competing on models, and now they are competing on timing. Both companies have taken the cheapest possible option on going public, and the one that reads the market better will list first, raise more, and set the terms of comparison for the other. The AI race now has a second scoreboard, and this one updates every trading day.

Category: Investment Research

"I'm researching [Company Name] ahead of its expected IPO. Summarize what is publicly known about its revenue, losses, valuation history, and main competitors. Then list the five biggest risks an investor should examine in its prospectus, and explain each risk in plain language with no jargon."

A confidential filing is supposed to be the quiet part of going public, and OpenAI announced it with a press release because it assumed the secret would not last a week. That says something about how much attention sits on this company, and maybe something about how the era of private AI labs building in the dark is closing. The next chapter gets written in quarterly earnings calls.

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— Vivek

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