OpenAI's chief financial officer told employees on Wednesday that the company "will be a public company in 2027," with a caveat attached: sooner, if the business keeps inflecting. Sarah Friar delivered the line at an all-hands meeting and added that the IPO is "not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise." She reminded the room that OpenAI raised $122 billion in March. [1]
The disclosure race she described is already running. OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC in June, and Anthropic did too, holding early meetings to test investor appetite ever since. [1] Friar told employees not to worry about sequencing. "There is a chance they pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September," she said of Anthropic. "That's OK, we are running our own race." [1] When OpenAI joined the confidential queue on June 8, Axios flagged the moment flatly: breaking news, paperwork filed.
Anthropic may go first in the way that counts. Bloomberg reported Thursday that the company is preparing to publicly file its paperwork as early as the end of this month, angling to match or surpass SpaceX's record-setting $75 billion June IPO. A public filing would give outsiders their first unfiltered look at Anthropic's financials and would beat OpenAI, widely expected to list later this year or in early 2027, to market. [2]
The numbers both labs chose to leak tell you what kind of race this is. OpenAI told investors it generated $6.7 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 18 percent from the first quarter, and Friar's slides put the revenue run rate up 35 percent quarter to date, enterprise revenue up 50 percent, and AI-coding usage at 20 million weekly users. The annualized run rate recently topped $40 billion. [1] Anthropic counters with scale of a different shape: an annualized run rate of $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago, and preliminary second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion. It raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation; OpenAI's March round valued it at $852 billion. [1][2]
Wall Street coverage reads all this as finance, because it is finance: timing, valuations, who benefits. CNBC noted the pressure on Friar from the other direction too, a wave of executive turnover that has backers fretting about chaos. Revenue chief Denise Dresser left after eight months. Brad Lightcap ended an eight-year stint. Product chief Fidji Simo stepped down in July. President Greg Brockman called the churn "not actually that atypical." [1]
The part the finance desks underweight is the part AI X will not stop arguing about. Safety-community accounts spent Wednesday and Thursday relitigating whether an IPO is compatible with what Anthropic wrote in 2023, when its Core Views essay promised safety commitments that would survive commercial pressure. One faction calls the listing mission drift, proof that every lab converges on the market once capital demands it. The other calls capital the price of survival: you cannot ship safe models from a balance sheet you cannot fund. Between them run the stan wars, where fans score each lab off leaked slide decks the way sports fans score trades.
Both framings miss what the filing itself does. A public S-1 forces disclosure that neither lab currently curates: revenue concentration by customer, compute obligations, safety-incident liabilities, the actual cost of the alignment work each claims as identity. The market is about to receive the most detailed external audit of frontier-lab governance ever assembled, and it will arrive as a prospectus rather than a manifesto. That document, not the opening bell, is the real accountability event.
There is also a government shadow over Anthropic's debut specifically. The Trump administration has sought to limit the Defense Department's use of its models for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, and has designated the company a supply-chain threat. [2] A company that publicly files while formally labeled a national-security risk will be answering two very different sets of questions from two very different audiences, in the same week, on the same record.
Friar's own metaphor gives away the ending. An IPO as "another fundraise" is an honest sentence, and honesty of that kind is new for this industry. The labs are no longer selling missions. They are selling shares, and shares come with a mirror attached.
-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York