OpenAI is about to file for an IPO, and prediction markets think Anthropic just lost the race to go public first

The AI industry’s most consequential race is no longer about building the best model. It is about getting to public markets first. OpenAI appears to have taken the lead.

The company is preparing to confidentially file a draft of its IPO prospectus as soon as this week, according to CNBC, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising on the process. The target is an autumn debut, potentially as early as September, at a valuation that could exceed $1 trillion.

That timeline caught prediction market traders off guard. Before the Wall Street Journal first reported the filing plans, Kalshi traders gave OpenAI just a 32 per cent chance of beating Anthropic to a public listing. That figure has since jumped to 83 per cent. On Polymarket, the odds of Anthropic going public first collapsed from 69 per cent to 20 per cent in a matter of hours.

“Getting to public markets first is very important, given this arms race going on,” said Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ global head of technology research. The logic is straightforward: the first major AI company to list captures the bulk of institutional capital allocated to the sector, sets the valuation benchmark, and forces rivals to price against it.

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OpenAI’s most recent private funding round, which closed in March, raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. The round was anchored by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, with continued backing from Microsoft. Secondary market trades have since pushed the implied value higher still.

The timing is not accidental. Last weekend, a California jury dismissed all claims in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, ruling that Musk had waited too long to file. The verdict removed what had been a persistent legal cloud over the company’s governance and for-profit transition. Musk called it a “calendar technicality” and vowed to appeal, but the market read it as a green light.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, had been widely expected to list first. The Claude maker’s annualised revenue surged from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March, driven largely by demand for its coding tools. It has been in early talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about an IPO that could come as early as October.

But OpenAI’s move to file first changes the dynamics. If it lists in September, Anthropic would face the choice of rushing its own process or waiting until 2027, by which point its trillion-dollar secondary market valuation may have cooled. The first AI mega-IPO will absorb a huge share of institutional attention and capital. The second will get what remains.

The stakes extend beyond OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX is also expected to file this year, with a target valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion. Together, these three companies could represent nearly $3 trillion in new public market capitalisation, a volume that will test investor appetite and could reshape how Wall Street allocates to technology.

For OpenAI, the IPO would cap a remarkable transformation. The company was founded as a non-profit research lab in 2015. It is now a for-profit entity backed by more than $200 billion in cumulative funding, building consumer products used by hundreds of millions of people. Whether its revenue, currently growing fast but still dwarfed by its spending, can justify a trillion-dollar public market valuation is the question investors will have to answer.

The filing, when it lands, will be confidential. The public will not see OpenAI’s financials until it chooses to disclose them. But the signal is already clear: in the AI funding arms race, OpenAI is no longer content to stay private.