San Francisco, May 30, 2026, 11:06 PDT
- OpenAI has talked about bringing Citigroup and JPMorgan on board for its IPO banking group, according to Bloomberg.
- Anthropic’s most recent funding round has pushed its valuation past the private-market level OpenAI reached in March.
- Now, it’s a race—timing, investor muscle, and the question of whether AI revenues can actually pull ahead of those massive compute bills.
OpenAI has reportedly been in talks with Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase to line them up for its anticipated IPO, Bloomberg News said, pointing to a broadening slate of Wall Street players for what might become one of tech’s biggest market debuts ever. The two banks would potentially work alongside Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which are already linked to deal preparations, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
The timing is striking for AI. Anthropic on Thursday announced it pulled in $65 billion, pegging its post-money valuation at $965 billion. That figure tops OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation from March, setting a new bar and putting more pressure on any OpenAI offering.
Reuters said May 20 that OpenAI is getting ready to file confidentially for a U.S. IPO within weeks, targeting a public debut as soon as September. Goldman and Morgan Stanley are already working on the draft prospectus. IPOX Vice President Kat Liu called Elon Musk’s legal challenge “a major obstacle” now out of the way. She also noted that with these mega-listings happening almost in parallel, portfolio managers will have to weigh them against each other. Reuters
Submitting a confidential filing doesn’t mean shares are hitting the market just yet. It’s an early move: the company hands in a draft registration statement for private SEC scrutiny, keeping its financials under wraps for now. The SEC typically requires those IPO documents to go public no less than 15 days before any roadshow or a requested effective date.
OpenAI’s numbers check the right boxes for Wall Street: massive scale, and a hunger for capital. On March 31, the company reported it had locked in $122 billion in committed funds, valuing the firm at $852 billion after the deal, with monthly revenue hitting $2 billion.
Friday brought a new commercial development. Japan’s finance minister Satsuki Katayama said certain Japanese banks have secured access to OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model, aimed at bolstering cybersecurity defenses. The update followed her discussion in Tokyo with Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.
OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC, per Reuters, that the company has noticed “really strong demand” from individual investors in its most recent funding round. She added that behaving like a public company is “good hygiene” for a firm of OpenAI’s scale. There’s also a signal that retail investors could see a portion of any eventual offering. Reuters
Competition is heating up. Just last week, Alphabet’s Google slashed prices for select corporate AI customers and rolled out an updated Antigravity coding assistant. That tool targets the same enterprise software buyers OpenAI and Anthropic have been chasing.
Fund managers are bracing for a crowded lineup of IPOs. This week, Reuters reported that U.S. funds have started putting cash on the sidelines as SpaceX and OpenAI move toward public listings. Goldman Sachs’ John Flood noted rising investor attention on how the surge in big IPOs could play out.
Still, plenty of uncertainty remains. A confidential filing leaves valuation, timing, and the true level of demand up in the air. Anyone looking to buy in faces a checklist: OpenAI’s revenue surge, ongoing cash burn, the hefty price tag for model training, persistent governance issues, plus competition from Anthropic and Google. HSBC analysts, cited by Reuters Breakingviews, are projecting $34 billion in OpenAI revenue for this year, rising to $64 billion next year. Yet OpenAI could burn through $25 billion in cash this year alone, according to The Information.
Right now, it’s not so much about OpenAI itself hitting public markets; what’s swelling is the ecosystem swirling around it. Banks, competitors, and deep-pocketed investors are all piling in, even though the company hasn’t yet revealed the numbers that will ultimately shape the deal.
