OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced Monday, entering a public market race alongside rival Anthropic, which filed just over a week earlier. The offering could value OpenAI, which counts roughly 900 million weekly active users, at close to its last private valuation of $852 billion.
The filing arrives amid significant financial pressure. OpenAI secured $122 billion in funding earlier this year, but projects burning $85 billion in 2028 alone, even after doubling sales, raising questions about a path to profitability that public market investors will need to price carefully. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar has reportedly flagged concerns about sustaining the company’s data center spending at its current scale.
Meanwhile, chief executive Sam Altman’s separate biometric identity venture, Tools for Humanity, is reportedly conducting layoffs as it struggles to generate revenue. The company, valued at $2.5 billion and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital, operates the World verification platform, which uses iris-scanning hardware to distinguish human identity from bot activity and to support its Worldcoin cryptocurrency. U.S. partners including Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign have integrated the technology, but the company has faced significant regulatory pushback internationally. Kenya banned operations over privacy concerns, and South Korea fined the company $830,000 for alleged violations of local privacy law.
The parallel difficulties at Tools for Humanity add complexity to Altman’s public profile at a moment when OpenAI’s governance history, ongoing litigation, and long-term burn rate are all set to face the scrutiny of public market investors.
