OpenAI has held early discussions with investors about a fresh funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at more than $1.2 trillion, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, in what would rank among the largest private fundraises ever attempted. Reuters and The Wall Street Journal quickly followed with their own confirmations, and The Information reported similar early conversations about a round that could lift the company's valuation to $1.2 trillion or higher.
According to the FT, the round would allow longtime backers to increase their exposure to OpenAI ahead of a long-anticipated initial public offering. A person familiar with the matter said any decision to move forward with the fundraise will hinge on exactly when OpenAI decides to go public. The talks were reportedly initiated by investors rather than by the company itself. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news.
A Valuation That Would Leapfrog Anthropic
A round at that scale would cement OpenAI's position as the most valuable private AI company in the world. It would also allow the company to leapfrog its chief rival Anthropic, which raised capital in May at a $965 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg reporting.
Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said in an interview with Fortune that the company's IPO is still in the works but will not happen this year, adding that it will likely not take place until 2027. That timeline effectively pushes the listing well past the window many investors had expected, making a private round the most direct way for existing backers to enlarge their stakes in the meantime.
From Filing to Delay: OpenAI's Long IPO Runway
OpenAI's path to the public markets has been winding. The company filed for a US initial public offering in June, Reuters reported at the time, following Anthropic's own filing as the two AI giants raced each other to Wall Street. Altman subsequently argued that going public this year would be ill-advised amid the roiling debate over AI safety, and reporting through the summer has consistently pointed to a listing that has slipped past 2026.
The company's scale explains the patience of its investors. ChatGPT has approached one billion weekly active users according to figures reported earlier this year, and the rollout of its GPT-6 Astra model has drawn intense enterprise demand in recent weeks — enough that OpenAI paused new signups for its ChatGPT Pro tier as servers strained under the load.
An IPO Race With a Record to Beat
OpenAI is not alone in courting public markets. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, is preparing for its own IPO and has picked the Nasdaq as its listing venue. Bloomberg has reported that Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as or more than SpaceX did in its record $86.3 billion offering in June, with the listing potentially arriving as soon as October.
The prospect of two back-to-back mega-listings has turned the AI IPO race into one of the most closely watched stories in capital markets. A new private round for OpenAI at a $1.2 trillion-plus valuation would set a striking reference point for those negotiations — and could complicate Anthropic's effort to command a premium of its own if investors begin questioning how the two leaders' relative valuations square with their relative revenue.
Timing on the Heels of GPT-6 Astra
The Wall Street Journal reported that the discussions come on the heels of the release of OpenAI's latest cutting-edge model, GPT-6 Astra, whose launch has dominated the industry's attention. The model's rollout has not been without friction — OpenAI has restricted access to the model's most capable variants over cybersecurity concerns, even as paying customers have rushed to adopt it.
That commercial momentum appears to be part of the pitch to investors. If the talks mature into a term sheet, longtime shareholders such as venture firms and sovereign wealth funds would gain a fresh opportunity to average up their positions before the company's financials face the scrutiny of public-market regulators.
Safety Debate Shadows the Fundraise
The news lands at an unusual moment. Just this week, Altman stood alongside rival CEOs at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference endorsing a call from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to consider slowing the pace of frontier AI development — a position that drew a sharp public rebuke from Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who called the speed-versus-safety framing a false choice, according to CNBC.
The juxtaposition has not gone unnoticed by critics or customers. The Information reported that the "pacing" debate spooked some startup customers who depend on both labs' models. President Donald Trump, for his part, dismissed the safety warnings as a hoax during the same news cycle, arguing that any slowdown would hand an advantage to China.
Whether those crosscurrents affect the fundraise remains to be seen. The talks are at an early stage, involve several large investors, and may not result in a deal, the people familiar with the matter cautioned. But if completed at the reported valuation, the round would underscore how dramatically private-market appetite for frontier AI has grown — and would make OpenAI's path to a 2027 public debut the most expensive IPO runway ever built.
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