Artificial intelligence leader OpenAI is reportedly gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO) scheduled for late 2026, aiming for a valuation around $1 trillion. According to multiple anonymous sources cited by Reuters, the upcoming public offering could include raising approximately $60 billion in capital, positioning OpenAI as one of the largest IPOs in the technology sector.
The company is expected to submit its IPO filing to U.S. securities regulators in the second half of 2026, ahead of an earlier anticipated timeline that targeted 2027 for going public. Should these plans materialize, OpenAI would solidify its status as the world’s highest-valued startup, having previously reached a $500 billion valuation during a secondary share sale in October 2023.
During that share sale, OpenAI employees reportedly sold $6.6 billion in stock to prominent institutional investors, surpassing the valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was estimated at $400 billion at the time. This significant capital influx reflects the increasing investment interest in AI technology and OpenAI’s leadership within the field.
Despite these reports, an OpenAI spokesperson emphasized that there is no finalized timeline for the IPO. The company continues to prioritize its mission of advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) with a focus on building a resilient business foundation. “Our goal remains to develop AGI in a way that benefits everyone,” the spokesperson stated.
In other AI-related developments, OpenAI’s flagship language model ChatGPT recently faced competition in a niche application of autonomous cryptocurrency trading. Chinese AI models DeepSeek and Qwen3 Max temporarily outperformed both ChatGPT and Meta’s Grok during a crypto trading contest. Notably, DeepSeek achieved a positive return of around 9% as of late October 2023, while ChatGPT-5 experienced a substantial loss of 66%.
This outcome surprised industry observers, especially given DeepSeek’s development reportedly cost $5.3 million—far less than OpenAI’s $5.7 billion investment in research and development during just the first half of 2025. Experts suggest that differences in training data and prompt engineering could explain the trading performance variances among the AI models, with potential for improvement as models evolve.
According to Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at crypto intelligence firm Nansen, “Assuming all models received the same trading instructions, performance disparities likely stem from the variation in training datasets used by each AI.” The competitive AI landscape continues to drive rapid innovation in both language processing and specialized financial applications like crypto trading.
As OpenAI prepares for its potential public debut, these developments highlight the dynamic interplay between AI advancements and market enthusiasm. The company’s progress in AGI research, paired with growing institutional investment interest, sets the stage for what could be one of the most influential tech IPOs of the decade.
