OpenAI is now targeting a public listing within the next year, reports The Information, citing internal communication where CEO Sam Altman told employees that the company is preparing for a potential IPO in roughly a 12-month window. While the timing is not fixed, the guidance suggests OpenAI is internally planning for a possible listing around 2026-2027, depending on market conditions, regulatory readiness, and product milestones.
The timeline expectations come as the Sam Altman-led firm continues to maintain optionality over when to actually list, balancing investor pressure with technical and strategic considerations. The report indicates that leadership is deliberately avoiding a rigid schedule, as the company wants to preserve flexibility in case major advances in AI systems – particularly more autonomous or agent-like models – require additional private development before facing public-market scrutiny.
In parallel with these timeline discussions, OpenAI confirmed that it filed confidential draft IPO paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 8, formally initiating the regulatory process for a future listing. The filing itself does not disclose financials or commit to a valuation or offering date, but it allows the company to begin working through the SEC review process while keeping details private. This step is standard for large tech companies preparing for an IPO, especially those with highly sensitive financial and operational data.
Meanwhile, market expectations around the potential listing are already extremely high. OpenAI is currently valued in private markets at around $852 billion, and estimates suggest that a successful IPO could push its valuation toward or beyond $1 trillion, depending on revenue growth and investor demand. And to provide liquidity ahead of a public listing, the company is also preparing a secondary tender offer reportedly priced around $687.69 per share, allowing employees and early investors to sell portions of their holdings before the IPO event.
The latest report also revealed that OpenAI is accelerating development of its next-generation AI systems, focusing on more advanced ‘agentic AI’ capabilities. These upcoming models are expected to move beyond conversational responses into systems capable of performing multi-step tasks like coding, research, and workflow automation with limited human intervention. Improvements in reasoning ability, multimodal understanding across text, image, audio, and video, and long-context memory are also central to the company’s roadmap, showing a shift toward more autonomous digital assistants.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
