OpenAI and Anthropic Are Both Going Public – and ChatGPT Just Got Ads

📖 6 min read

Within eight days of each other, the two most powerful AI companies on earth filed confidential IPO registration statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Anthropic went first on June 1, 2026. OpenAI followed on June 8. For the first time, the tools powering your work might soon be traded on a public stock exchange – and what happens next will reshape how these services are priced, governed, and built.

What Actually Happened

A confidential S-1 filing is the formal first step in going public. It lets a company start the SEC review process without immediately disclosing financials to the public. No audited numbers are officially public yet – those come when the prospectus is released closer to listing.

Key confirmed facts as of June 18, 2026:

• OpenAI: Confidential S-1 filed around May 22, publicly confirmed June 8. Last private valuation: $852 billion (March 2026). Analysts point to a fall 2026 listing window – September to November – though no official date has been confirmed. Some reports cite a target valuation of up to $1 trillion.
• Anthropic: Confidential S-1 filed June 1, a week ahead of OpenAI. Last known valuation: approximately $965 billion post-money, following a $65 billion Series H raise.
• Context: SpaceX is also filing for public markets in the same cycle, putting the combined private-market valuation pipeline for these three companies at roughly $3.6 trillion, according to Bloomberg.

The Financials Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here is where it gets real. Both companies have been burning cash at a scale that is hard to wrap your head around.

Metric	OpenAI	Anthropic
2026 Revenue Run-Rate	~$30 billion	~$47 billion
2025 Net Loss	~$39 billion	Not yet disclosed
Q1 2026 Cash Burn	~$3.7 billion	Not yet disclosed
Expected 2026 Net Loss	~$14 billion	Not yet disclosed
Last Private Valuation	$852 billion	~$965 billion
Weekly Active Users	900 million (ChatGPT, as of March 2026)	Not disclosed
Business Customers	1 million+	Not disclosed

OpenAI’s trajectory tells a specific story: revenue growing fast, losses shrinking year-over-year (from $39B in 2025 toward $14B expected in 2026), but still deeply unprofitable. The company is racing to grow fast enough that Wall Street will overlook the red ink – the same bet Amazon made for a decade, and Tesla before that.

There is a structural complication that IPO investors will have to price in: Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and, under their agreement, receives a 20% cut of OpenAI’s revenue. That is a meaningful drag on any path to profitability.

ChatGPT Is Getting Ads – Here is Why

Public markets demand a visible path to profitability. Enter advertising.

OpenAI quietly published formal Advertising Terms in early June 2026, confirming it is building an ads business inside ChatGPT. The rollout is carefully scoped – ads can appear in regulated verticals (financial, legal, medical) in “limited circumstances” when contextually relevant. OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson confirmed to Marketing Brew that the company is not widely inserting ads into sensitive conversations, but those categories are now open in principle.

The risk is visible. OpenAI’s 900 million weekly users chose ChatGPT partly because it felt different from an ad-driven product. The 6% of enterprise leaders who say they could “easily” switch providers have more reason to look around if that changes. The 94% who say switching is hard are the audience OpenAI is counting on to absorb the shift.

Legal Headwinds Hit at the Worst Possible Time

Going public means disclosing everything – including legal exposure. OpenAI has a lot of it.

• A coalition of 42 U.S. state attorneys general launched a sweeping investigation just days after OpenAI’s IPO filing was publicly confirmed. The subpoena covers ChatGPT’s advertising practices, data use, handling of minors, model sycophancy, and safety policies.
• Florida officially sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in June 2026, following a criminal inquiry launched in April. The civil lawsuit accuses OpenAI of knowingly releasing products that caused harm.

None of this automatically derails an IPO. But the S-1 prospectus, when published, will have a risk factors section that reads like a legal thriller. That typically compresses the opening-day valuation pop and raises the cost of capital.

What Changes for Everyday Users

Most people use ChatGPT or Claude without thinking about who owns them or whether they are profitable. That is about to change. Here is what the IPO timeline means practically:

• API and Pro prices will likely rise. Public markets reward profitability. The era of below-cost API pricing and generous enterprise deals is a window that is closing. Digital Applied’s analysis calls it directly: treat current pricing “as a window that is closing, not a permanent condition.”
• More ads are coming. Not many at first. But shareholder pressure will be constant. A 900-million-user weekly audience is among the largest in tech. Advertisers are already circling.
• Short-term price war is possible. Benzinga reports OpenAI is weighing aggressive pricing moves against Anthropic. Two publicly traded companies competing for market share before their listings might produce a brief pricing dip. It will not last.
• Transparency improves significantly. Once public, both companies must disclose revenue, margins, safety incidents, and legal risks on a quarterly basis. The opacity that defines frontier AI development starts to lift.

The Scale of What Just Happened

In 2022, OpenAI had roughly 1 million users. By March 2026, it had 900 million weekly active users. In about 3.5 years, it went from a niche research lab to potentially the largest tech IPO since Meta’s debut at $104 billion in 2012 – except at a target valuation roughly 10 times larger.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI employees who left specifically over safety concerns. It is now valued near $965 billion and reportedly runs a higher annual revenue rate than OpenAI. Two companies that did not exist five years ago are now filing for IPO in the same week at combined valuations approaching $2 trillion.

If both list in fall 2026 as analysts expect, it will rank as one of the most significant financial events in tech history – on par with the Google IPO in 2004 or Facebook’s in 2012, but compressed into a single season.

BetOnAI Verdict

The hype around AI IPOs is real – but so are the risks. Here is the honest breakdown:

• For business users and developers: Lock in any favorable enterprise pricing now. The post-IPO environment will mean less willingness to subsidize your costs. Build with portability in mind – an abstraction layer between your code and any single provider is the hedge that makes sense right now.
• For ChatGPT and Claude subscribers: Expect your monthly bill to increase within 12 to 18 months of a public listing. Expect ads to get more visible in ChatGPT over time. This is not a reason to panic – it is capitalism catching up with the AI boom.
• The legal exposure matters. 42 state AGs plus an active Florida lawsuit heading into an IPO is material risk, not background noise. It will weigh on opening valuations and may push timeline to 2027 if it escalates.
• Anthropic’s numbers look better on paper (higher revenue run-rate, comparable valuation, cleaner legal profile so far), but there is still no full public disclosure to evaluate.

Bottom line: the two AI companies you probably already use every day are heading to Wall Street. That is a landmark moment. The era of AI as a research experiment is over. The era of AI as a quarterly earnings story begins.

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Sources

• Digital Applied – OpenAI Files to Go Public: What It Means for Your Stack
• Benzinga – OpenAI Reportedly Torched $3.7 Billion In Q1, Lost $39 Billion Last Year
• ReconnAI – OpenAI Files for IPO and Enters Advertising
• Tom’s Hardware – OpenAI Hit With Probe From 42 State AGs
• Marketing Brew – ChatGPT Opens Advertising Door to Regulated Verticals
• Cryptonomist – OpenAI’s Confidential IPO Filing Targets December 2026 Debut
• Yahoo Finance – OpenAI Makes IPO Decision Amid Anthropic, SpaceX Fervor