OpenAI files confidential S-1, opens Codex to Oracle Cloud customers in 48-hour enterprise push

The ChatGPT maker submitted draft IPO paperwork to the SEC at an $852 billion valuation, then said Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers will be able to apply existing Universal Credits to OpenAI's frontier models and the Codex coding agent.

OpenAI confirmed on June 10 that it had submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then spent the next 24 hours announcing that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers will soon be able to spend their existing Universal Credits on OpenAI’s frontier models and the Codex coding agent. The sequencing isn’t coincidence. It’s a roadshow.

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1,” the company said in a statement filed under Rule 135 of the Securities Act, adding the unusually candid line: “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it.” OpenAI declined to commit to a timeline, citing “things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.”

The numbers anchoring the filing come from a $122 billion round that closed in March, leaving OpenAI at an $852 billion post-money valuation. Per the Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the process ahead of a possible fall listing, with a planned employee tender offer at the same mark, according to CNBC. ChatGPT, the company says, now has more than 900 million weekly active users.

OpenAI is the third major AI company in two weeks to move toward public markets. Anthropic disclosed its own confidential filing on June 1 at a $965 billion valuation. SpaceX, now merged with xAI, has begun a roadshow targeting $1.77 trillion. A queue is forming, and OpenAI isn’t leading it.

That explains the Oracle announcement, posted to the Applied AI blog on June 11. “Enterprises often want to deploy AI through the procurement processes and governance frameworks they already trust,” the company wrote. Translated: routing model spend through OCI commitments removes a friction point at exactly the moment business-customer numbers matter most.

Emarketer analyst Nate Elliott told Fortune that OpenAI “appears to be losing ChatGPT’s strong early leads with consumers and businesses to Google and Anthropic,” and “doesn’t have a lot of other places to look for the enormous capital required to support its costs.” The Journal has reported Anthropic pulling ahead among enterprise buyers while OpenAI misses internal revenue targets.

A confidential S-1 the company expects to leak, paired with a distribution deal timed to the hour, is what narrative management looks like when the competitive lead is no longer assumed.

OpenAI files confidential S-1, opens Codex to Oracle Cloud customers in 48-hour enterprise push

Sources