Source: The Mercury News — OpenAI is considering an initial public offering as soon as 2027, according to people familiar with the matter, a timeline that would place its public debut shortly after Anthropic's expected IPO. The report, published June 26, signals that both of the AI industry's most prominent frontier labs are accelerating toward public markets amid intense investor demand.
Anthropic is expected to go public first, with its IPO anticipated before OpenAI's. The sequencing matters: Anthropic's market reception will set the valuation benchmark for the entire frontier AI sector, and OpenAI — still structured as a capped-profit company under a nonprofit parent — faces additional governance complexity that could complicate its offering.
Both companies are navigating the same headwinds: escalating compute costs, regulatory scrutiny from the Trump administration's export control regime, and the question of whether current revenue growth justifies the astronomical private valuations they've accumulated. OpenAI's potential 2027 window also coincides with the expected maturation of GPT-5.6 and whatever follows it.
Analysis
The IPO race between OpenAI and Anthropic is the most consequential financial event in AI since Microsoft's OpenAI investment, and it will test whether the "research lab that sells access" model can survive public market scrutiny. OpenAI going second is advantageous — it gets to watch Anthropic's roadshow, see what valuation multiples the market accepts, and adjust its narrative accordingly. But it also carries risk: if Anthropic's IPO disappoints — if public investors balk at the compute-cost-to-revenue ratio that venture capitalists have been willing to overlook — OpenAI's window narrows dramatically. The governance question is the wild card. OpenAI's nonprofit-controlled structure was designed to prevent exactly this moment from becoming a pure profit-maximisation exercise. Watch for a restructuring announcement in the next six months that redefines the relationship between OpenAI LP and its nonprofit parent. Without it, the IPO is a governance lawsuit waiting to happen. With it, OpenAI signals that the mission guardrails from 2015 are being retired as thoroughly as GPT-4.5.
