Developer ChatGPT is rushing to IPO in 2026 ahead of Antrophic. Why would he do that?

ChatGPT creator OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public offering in the fourth quarter of this year, sources familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The company is accelerating its IPO preparations amid intensifying competition with Anthropic - a developer of large language models and AI systems - which also plans to go public in 2026.

OpenAI is in informal talks with Wall Street banks about a potential IPO and is expanding its finance team, WSJ sources said . In particular, the company has hired a new director of accounting, Ajmer Dale, and a director of corporate finance, Cynthia Gaylor, who will oversee investor relations.

OpenAI is now in the process of a massive capital raise, which could take most of this year and actually be a preliminary round before the IPO, the newspaper's sources noted. The company is seeking to raise more than $100 billion, which could eventually lead to a $830 billion valuation for the ChatGPT developer, WSJ points out.

Earlier this week, the newspaper's interlocutors reported that Japanese holding SoftBank is discussing investments of about $30 billion in OpenAI. The online giant Amazon, as well as Nvidia and Microsoft are also in talks about possible investments of tens of billions of dollars in the ChatGPT developer.

The year 2026 may become a record year in terms of the number of offerings on the stock market, writes WSJ. In addition to OpenAI, Elon Musk's company SpaceX and AI startup Anthropic are going to go public this year. According to WSJ sources, OpenAI executives have privately expressed concerns that Anthropic could beat developer ChatGPT to an IPO. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, has told financial partners that it is considering an offering before the end of this year. The startup's sales have been skyrocketing - thanks in large part to the popularity of its viral programming agent Claude Code. The company is now pursuing a new round of funding, which WSJ sources say could exceed Anthropic's initial goal of raising $10 billion.

Whichever company goes public first - OpenAI or Anthropic - is likely to benefit from a wide range of public market investors, including private investors seeking access to a new wave of generative AI companies, the WSJ writes.

However, pulling off a successful public offering before the end of the year won't be easy for developer ChatGPT, notes The Wall Street Journal. The company still faces the typical challenges of a fast-growing startup. OpenAI has recently undergone a management reshuffle and is facing competition in its core business from Google and AI model Gemini. This prompted OpenAI to announce a code red mode last December to improve the quality of ChatGPT.

The IPO could help OpenAI build market confidence in its financial position after investors began questioning how the company would pay for infrastructure and chip deals totaling hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years, the WSJ explains. OpenAI and Anthropic lose billions of dollars each year investing in developing new AI models and supporting their products. According to projections presented to investors last year, Anthropic expects to break even for the first time in 2028 - two years earlier than OpenAI, WSJ writes.

"Am I happy to be the CEO of a publicly traded company? Zero percent. Am I excited about OpenAI going public? In some ways yes, and in some ways it will be terribly annoying," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the December 2025 Big Technology podcast. If OpenAI goes public, he is expected to delegate some of his responsibilities to the former CEO of grocery and convenience store delivery service Instacart, Fiji Xi Ximo, who heads OpenAI's product and business lines, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor