OpenAI Is Reportedly Prepping To File For An IPO. Here’s Why Sam Altman Says It Could Be "Really Annoying."
OpenAI could be going public in the next few months, but Altman seems ambivalent about the change in structure.
This article, written by Ben Sherry, was originally published on Inc.com.
OpenAI, the privately owned company behind ChatGPT, is preparing to file for an initial public offering (IPO) in the coming weeks, according to a new report from The New York Times.
The news follows OpenAI’s legal victory over Elon Musk, who had sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company’s founding charter by shifting from a nonprofit research lab to a for‑profit enterprise. With Musk’s lawsuit now resolved, one of the biggest legal overhangs on OpenAI’s business has been lifted, effectively clearing the company’s path to public markets.
An OpenAI IPO could be one of the largest public market debuts ever. The company was most recently valued at roughly US$852 billion, following a massive private funding round earlier this year, placing it in rarefied territory typically reserved for the world’s biggest tech giants. The Times reported that OpenAI is collaborating with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to prepare its IPO paperwork and that a listing could take place as early as September.
Altman has not been subtle about his long‑term intention to take OpenAI public, though he has repeatedly voiced ambivalence about what that would mean in practice. On a recent episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology podcast, Altman confirmed his desire for OpenAI to eventually become a public company while expressing discomfort with the personal role that would require. “Am I excited to be a public company CEO? Zero percent,” Altman said. “Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways I am, and in some ways I think it’ll be really annoying.”
That tension underscores one of the biggest open questions surrounding the IPO: whether Altman will remain at the helm once OpenAI is answerable to public shareholders. Running a public company would subject OpenAI to quarterly earnings pressure, heightened regulatory scrutiny, and require far more transparency around its finances, governance, and strategic trade‑offs.
The timing of the IPO will likely place OpenAI in direct comparison with other mega‑scale tech offerings. It is unlikely to beat Elon Musk’s SpaceX to the market, though. SpaceX is widely expected to be one of the largest IPOs of the decade and now also owns Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Still, OpenAI’s debut would mark a defining moment for the AI industry, signaling its transition from a venture‑backed boom to a permanent fixture of global public markets.
