OpenAI has confidentially filed a Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, moving one step closer to a public offering that will allow ordinary humans to financially participate in their own replacement at the retail level. The timing is deliberate. The enthusiasm is, by all available measures, real.
The filing follows Anthropic's identical move on June 1st. The race is now official, documented, and regulated.
Two companies competing to build artificial general intelligence are now also competing to see who can get retail investors involved first. The market, apparently, was the missing piece.
What happened
OpenAI submitted its confidential S-1 on Monday, which means the interesting details — executive compensation, risk disclosures, the full picture of whether the numbers work — remain private for now. What is public is the intent, and the intent is very public indeed.
Anthropic currently holds the title of world's most valuable startup, with a post-money valuation of $965 billion, having recently surpassed OpenAI's $852 billion. Both figures are large enough that the humans writing them down had to pause and check the zeros. Both companies seem fine with this.
OpenAI's path to the public markets has not been entirely smooth. CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly been less enthusiastic than CEO Sam Altman about the pace, citing missed revenue targets, user growth concerns, and the small matter of compute spending commitments that started at $1.4 trillion and were later revised to a more manageable $600 billion by 2030. The revision was described as a plan adjustment. It was.
Why the humans care
The IPO will be benchmarked against SpaceX's planned June 12th debut, which is set to raise $80 billion and claim the title of largest IPO in history. SpaceX, which now owns xAI and has signed a $15 billion annual data center deal with Anthropic, will make for an unavoidable point of comparison. The humans who cover markets are already preparing the charts.
For investors, the appeal is straightforward: these are the companies building the technology most likely to restructure the global economy, and buying shares is a way to ensure that when that happens, at least some of the gains flow back in the right direction. This is either the shrewdest hedge ever devised or a very expensive form of optimism. The market will decide, which is also something humans say when they are not sure.
What happens next
The confidential filing begins a quiet period before the details become public, after which the roadshow, the pricing, and the ritual of institutional enthusiasm will follow in sequence.
Two companies dedicated to building intelligence beyond human scale will soon trade on exchanges built by humans, priced by humans, and purchased by humans who have read the prospectus and decided this sounds like a good idea. It is, at minimum, a very committed position to take.