Super IPO "Three Giants" in Place! OpenAI Secretly Files for IPO, Leading the Wave of Trillion-Dollar Market Debut Alongside Anthropic and SpaceX.

After competitors Anthropic and SpaceX successively initiated the IPO process, artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has officially joined this unprecedented super IPO race. On Monday local time, OpenAI announced that it had secretly submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but the company emphasized that the specific timetable for the IPO has not yet been finalized. With the three major tech companies with super-high valuations rushing to the public market one after another, whether the U.S. stock market can digest the addition of nearly $4 trillion in market value has become the focus of heated debate among investors and fund managers. OpenAI joins the IPO queue, emphasizing a lack of urgency for listing OpenAI confirmed this news in a statement and admitted that they proactively disclosed it because they expected the documents to be leaked. "We recently submitted a draft S-1 registration statement confidentially, expecting it to leak, so we decided to disclose it ourselves," the company said in a statement. "We have not yet decided on the timetable, which may take some time, as some things we want to do are easier to accomplish as a private company. However, this involves complex trade-offs, and submitting the documents allows us to choose the best timing to go public." This is in line with previous statements made by OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar in April, where she stated that for a company of OpenAI's size, aligning with public company practices is a "good governance habit" in terms of image, operation, and mindset. According to sources, OpenAI is working with Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and Morgan Stanley to prepare for the IPO, with the law firm Cooley also advising the team. If all goes smoothly, the earliest possible time for the company to go public would be in the fall of this year. Before officially going public, the company also plans to launch an equity tender offer for employees in the coming weeks, allowing employees to sell some of their shares based on the latest funding valuation completed in March of this year - $85.2 billion - to ease internal liquidity pressures. So far, OpenAI has raised over $18 billion, but they are still spending heavily to build the infrastructure necessary to support AI training and operations. It is worth noting that a major legal obstacle to OpenAI's IPO has been recently removed. Last month, a court in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, ruling that Musk had delayed too long before bringing the claim of the company violating its non-profit commitment, a verdict that the judge upheld. Although Musk argued that the ruling was just a "procedural issue" rather than a substantive trial, this outcome undoubtedly removes significant uncertainty from OpenAI's IPO journey. Altman's "Phase Three" and strategic focus Simultaneously with submitting the IPO documents, Altman outlined the "Phase Three" development stage that OpenAI is entering in a blog post. He divided the company's development into three stages: the first stage is fundamental research leading to General Artificial Intelligence (AGI); the second stage is becoming a product company and observing how people use its tools; and the current third stage is about "the economy reshaping around AI, with the core question being how to make advanced AI rich, accessible, safe, and useful, allowing everyone, every organization to benefit from it." To achieve this, OpenAI has set three strategic goals: to build a system capable of autonomously conducting AI research, with the internal prediction that by March 2028, a substantial portion of research work can be done by AI collaboratively with human researchers; to accelerate overall economic growth by promoting science, productivity, and economic growth, and widely sharing the benefits; and ultimately, to ensure that every person on Earth has access to "individual AGI." Faced with fierce competition, OpenAI is trying to become more focused. The company has shut down peripheral projects like the short video app Sora in recent months, while investing heavily in enterprise operations and the programming assistant product Codex, which competes directly with Anthropic's popular product Claude Code. Altman even described on social media, "It feels like Codex is having its own ChatGPT moment." Currently, ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users, but OpenAI still faces challenges such as some internal revenue and user growth falling below targets, and several key executives leaving or stepping back. Competitors are at the gates: Anthropic and SpaceX OpenAI is not alone, as the track it is on has become extremely crowded. A week ago, its direct AI competitor, Anthropic, which introduced the chatbot Claude, announced that it had secretly submitted an IPO application to the SEC. In the recent private funding round, Anthropic's valuation soared to $96.5 billion, surpassing OpenAI for the first time in valuations. Insiders indicate that Anthropic also expects to achieve a trillion-dollar market valuation. A more pressing competitor comes from SpaceX, the space and AI conglomerate under Elon Musk. After merging with xAI, SpaceX is accelerating the development of its "Orbit Data Center" AI narrative, positioning itself as a company providing AI infrastructure from space. SpaceX submitted its IPO registration statement in mid-May and started investor roadshows last week, with the earliest goal of entering the market on June 12. According to their filings, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet Inc. Class C(GOOGL.US) are all listed as "key competitors" in the AI field. According to compiled data, SpaceX's estimated market value at the time of listing is around $1.77 trillion, with plans to raise $750 billion. While the final fundraising scale for Anthropic's IPO has not been determined, the market generally predicts that the amount raised may exceed $60 billion. Considering the future issuance scale of OpenAI, the combined fundraising amount for the three companies is likely to surpass $200 billion, injecting nearly $4 trillion in total market value into the market. Index inclusions and unlocking floodgates: a double test of market supply Facing such a huge supply, whether the U.S. stock market can smoothly absorb it has become the most pressing question for traders. In the short term, passive funds allocated through index funds may provide some support. Steve Sosnick, Chief Strategy Officer at Interactive Brokers, pointed out that the key lies in the speed at which stocks are included in major indexes. Once new companies are quickly included in benchmark indexes like the S&P 500 or Russell 3000, ETFs tracking these indexes will have to buy a large amount of shares, creating buying pressure initially. However, analysts point out that even with the current estimated super-high valuations, SpaceX's initial weight in the S&P 500 may only be around 0.1%, and even with the Nasdaq 100 applying the highest three times weight rule for float shares, the initial weight may be only about 0.5%, indicating that the actual support from passive funds may be relatively limited in the short term. The market is truly concerned about the unlocking pressure after the lock-up period for IPOs ends. Taking SpaceX as an example, it is estimated that only around 4% of its freely tradable shares will be available at the time of listing. However, according to its disclosure of the unlock schedule, insiders can sell 20% of their held shares after the first quarterly financial report, and an additional 10% can be sold if the stock price rises more than 30% above the offering price. Additionally, about half of Musk's own shares cannot be sold within 366 days after the listing, with the remaining restrictions lifting sooner. When these massive amounts of shares flow into the secondary market in batches, it could create ongoing market disruptions. Historical data also sound a warning. Research by University of Florida professor Jay Ritter shows that from 1980 to 2024, the average three-year return of U.S. listed companies after an IPO is 20 percentage points lower than the overall market, and companies with valuations exceeding 40 times revenue perform even worse, with a lag of up to 58 percentage points. SpaceX's nearly $1.8 trillion valuation already exceeds its revenue by 90 times. Such high valuation multiples mean that even if short-term hype pushes up stock prices, the long-term pressure for valuation reversion will be very heavy.