Following rumors about a pending IPO filing, and following the announcement of an IPO filing by competitor Anthropic, OpenAI has confirmed that it has made its confidential pre-IPO filing with the SEC.

It's going to be a blockbuster year for tech IPOs, and likely we will see some more on-paper centimillionaires and billionaires minted in San Francisco as a result.

Following a rumor a couple weeks back that OpenAI was preparing to file its IPO paperwork with the Securities Exchange Commission, the company confirmed Monday that the filing has been made.

"We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it," OpenAI said in a release on its company blog. "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."

OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion, and a recent funding round valued competitor Anthropic at $965 billion, so the race is now on with both companies vying for further cash infusions from public stock offerings. Anthropic filed its S-1 paperwork a week ago today.

Both companies' IPOs will arrive in the wake of Elon Musk's SpaceX, the parent company of AI competitor xAI, as well as the far larger satellite enterprise Starlink. SpaceX's IPO is expected to happen Friday, in what is being called the biggest IPO in history.

The trio of stocks, once they are all public, will test the public's and Wall Street's appetite for and confidence in AI stocks and Elon Musk's businesses in general.

A public-facing document regarding OpenAI's IPO will come after they receive feedback from regulators about the confidential filing, which contains financial information and details about future investment plans.

Previously: Like OpenAI, Anthropic Makes SEC Filing Ahead of Possible IPO

Top image: Photo by Zac Wolff