OpenAI prepares for possible 2026 IPO

OpenAI was reported to be laying groundwork for a possible initial public offering as early as the fourth quarter of 2026, including informal discussions with Wall Street banks, according to reporting picked up widely in mid-March 2026. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar had been building out the company’s finance team ahead of a potential listing, hiring Cynthia Gaylor, the former chief financial officer of DocuSign, to lead investor relations, corporate finance, long-range planning and capital strategy, alongside Ajmere Dale, a former chief accounting officer at Block, as chief accounting officer.

Alongside the finance hires, OpenAI leadership was reported to have told employees that ChatGPT needed to move beyond its reputation as an experimental assistant and become what one characterisation described as a “mission-critical productivity platform” — messaging aimed at enterprise buyers and, ultimately, at public-market investors who would expect predictable, recurring revenue rather than a consumer novelty. Chief executive Sam Altman had previously described mixed feelings about the prospect of running a public company, saying in earlier remarks that he was “in some ways” looking forward to it and “in some ways” thought it would be “really annoying.”

No formal IPO filing had been made as of the reporting; the coverage described preparation and internal signalling rather than a committed timeline. It came against a backdrop of competitive pressure from Anthropic, which OpenAI was reported to be concerned might reach public markets first, and followed a period of large private funding rounds that had already pushed OpenAI’s valuation into the hundreds of billions of dollars.