OpenAI is giving employees another path to cash while keeping its last $852 billion valuation intact. That number now has to survive a public-market test.
OpenAI has not announced a completed $7 billion buyback of employee stock. The cleaner story is narrower, and frankly more useful: the ChatGPT maker has filed confidential paperwork for an IPO and, according to The Information, plans a separate employee share sale at the same $852 billion valuation it set in March.
That is the point. Employees want liquidity before a listing. OpenAI wants to keep them from taking rival offers. Investors want to know whether the private-market price still holds when the company has to show audited numbers, risk factors, and a real path through its enormous compute bill.
OpenAI said on March 31 that it closed $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation. Its own announcement named SoftBank, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price Associates among the backers. Bloomberg also reported that Amazon agreed to invest $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank each put in $30 billion. Those are not ordinary venture checks. They are infrastructure-sized bets on a company that still needs more money than most public companies ever touch.
Flat still matters.
Liquidity buys time #
The Information reported on June 8 that OpenAI plans to let employees sell shares ahead of the IPO, but that staff had not yet been told how much they could sell or when the tender would happen. That is a very different signal from a completed $7 billion company buyback. One is a planned liquidity event. The other would be a closed transaction with a hard dollar amount. You should not treat them as the same thing.
OpenAI has used employee share sales before. In October 2025, more than 600 current and former employees sold a combined $6.6 billion of stock, with roughly 75 employees each selling up to the $30 million cap, according to reporting highlighted by the Wall Street Journal. That kind of money changes the internal math. Equity that sits on paper for years can turn into resentment, especially when Meta, Anthropic, xAI, and other labs are willing to pay heavily for senior researchers.
Cash changes that. It gives employees a reason to stay without forcing OpenAI to rush into a public listing before it wants to.
The tradeoff is that a tender at the March valuation does not prove the company is worth more today. It proves OpenAI can still point employees and selected buyers to the last private price. Public-market investors will be harder to manage. They will ask what the margins look like after inference costs, how much capital still has to go into data centers, and whether ChatGPT's consumer scale can become durable business revenue.
Anthropic makes the test harder #
Timing matters here. Anthropic confidentially submitted its own draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, one week before OpenAI announced its filing. Anthropic also said on May 28 that it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation, with run-rate revenue crossing $47 billion earlier that month. That put Claude's maker above OpenAI's last private valuation, at least on paper.
That gap is real. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, and it has turned Claude Code and enterprise demand into the kind of revenue story Wall Street understands quickly. OpenAI still has the consumer brand, the developer platform, and ChatGPT's enormous reach. But reach is not the same as public-market confidence. You have to show the economics.
OpenAI's own IPO announcement kept the timing open. The company said it had not decided when to list and that some work may be easier while private. Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki also framed the company as entering a third phase, focused on making advanced AI widely available and building automated AI research. That is an investor story as much as a mission statement.
The question is harder now. If OpenAI lets employees sell at $852 billion while Anthropic sits at $965 billion, the market will read both prices side by side. One company gets to argue scale. The other gets to argue momentum. Neither argument survives long without numbers underneath it.
A flat valuation doesn't put OpenAI in trouble. A company marked at $852 billion is already in rare territory. But if the next liquidity event comes at the same price, do not dress it up as fresh validation. It is a holding pattern before the real exam.
That is the next test.
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