On a Monday that felt less like a routine business announcement and more like a starting pistol, OpenAI revealed it had made a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for an initial public offering at some unspecified point in the future. The company, whose ChatGPT chatbot has become one of the most recognised software products in recent memory, was careful to temper expectations: there is no fixed timeline, and certain ambitions, its leadership acknowledged, may be easier to pursue while the firm remains private. Still, the filing itself was enough to electrify an industry already buzzing with speculation about which artificial intelligence colossus would reach the public markets first. What makes this moment particularly charged is that OpenAI does not stand alone in the queue.

Anthropic, the rival AI company whose Claude chatbot has drawn a loyal following among corporate users, is approaching a private valuation of $965bn, while OpenAI's own most recent private funding round placed it at $852bn. The two companies were separated at birth in a sense: Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, co-founded the firm five years ago after departing OpenAI over reported disagreements with Sam Altman, who leads OpenAI to this day. Their rivalry, born of a personal rupture, has since grown into one of the defining competitive relationships in the technology world. Sunil Krishnan of Aviva Investors offered perhaps the most candid explanation for the sudden urgency, noting that all three major AI firms — a group that includes SpaceX, targeting a valuation of $1.

75 trillion — carry a vast and unrelenting appetite for capital, spent on chips, data infrastructure, and the enormous cost of training ever-larger AI models. Nobody, he suggested to the BBC, wants to be the last to go public.