OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company, is reportedly planning an initial public offering (IPO) for late 2026, which could elevate the world’s largest startup to a trillion-dollar valuation.
The AI company aims to initiate its IPO at a $1 trillion valuation, which includes a $60 billion capital raise, according to three anonymous sources familiar with the situation, as reported by Reuters on Thursday.
The filing could be submitted to US securities regulators in the latter half of 2026, positioning OpenAI for a public market debut sooner than its previously announced 2027 target.
However, a spokesperson for OpenAI informed Reuters that there is no confirmed date for the IPO, emphasizing that the company’s main focus remains on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). “We are building a durable business and advancing our mission so everyone benefits from AGI,” they stated.
The potential offering size indicates increasing institutional interest in AI development, especially for OpenAI, which became the largest startup globally after achieving a $500 billion valuation in a secondary share sale on October 2.
During the share sales, OpenAI employees sold a total of $6.6 billion in stock to major corporate investors. This round pushed OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation past that of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is valued at $400 billion.
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Chinese AI rivals outperform ChatGPT in crypto trading
Despite its expanding budget, OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT has recently been surpassed in a specialized area: autonomous crypto trading.
In an autonomous crypto trading contest, Chinese AI chatbots DeepSeek and Qwen3 Max temporarily exceeded the performance of ChatGPT and Grok.
DeepSeek was the sole AI model to yield a positive trading return of about 9% as of October 22, whereas ChatGPT-5 fell to last place with a 66% loss.
The outcomes were unexpected, given that DeepSeek was developed with a total training cost of $5.3 million, a fraction of OpenAI’s $5.7 billion expenditure on research and development in the first half of 2025 alone.
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Nevertheless, with the right prompts and enhanced training data, the trading performance of certain AI models may improve, particularly for ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, according to Nicolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at the crypto intelligence platform Nansen.
“Assuming all models received the same prompts and instructions for trading, it can be assumed that the difference lies in the data each model has been trained on,” he mentioned to Cointelegraph.
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