They do because the other part of the equation is that they need to keep spending a lot of money to build out infrastructure faster than their two most significant competitors, one of which is public and wildly profitable (for non-AI reasons) and another has already filed for IPO. So it puts them at a disadvantage to walk away from a massive cash infusion.

At scale that OpenAI is valued at public markets are only place with enough of liquidity. At smaller scale private equity is an option. But if you are speaking of near trillion scale it really is not.

The investors need to make a couple trillion dollars soon or it all falls apart, right? Maybe I misunderstand how the financing for this works, but my understanding is they have borrowed and set on fire an enormous pile of money as a sacrifice to summon the Machine-God.

If He fails to arrive, or arrives late, they will be the railroad financiers in the Panic of '73.

I don't know why comments pointing out this simple fact are getting downvoted.

The oversimplified view that has been drilled into startup discussions for years has been that IPO is the singular goal for every startup and they need to get there as fast as possible, but that hasn't been true for a long while. There are high profile examples like Stripe with no intent to go public any time soon. Some public companies are even gradually doing share buybacks partially to remove their public exposure.

Being a public company kind of sucks in many ways. I'll admit my sample size is small, but every post-IPO CEO I've known has expressed some regrets about going public. It was a fascinating revelation to me after being raised on the idea that IPO is the ultimate victory goal of every startup.

VCs always want out when they've made their return. They are not in the business of owning companies for income.

The founders and VCs can shell shares to private investors, it's the employees who are sitting on options who get fucked.

Whatever private-market liquidity events they will be permitted to participate in will be highly disadvantaged compared to the other two groups.

Which is why Spacex was so rushed, and why they insisted on new rules for early exits and inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 index.

I'm not certain OpenAI or Anthropic have a viable business, either, but Spacex definitely pulled a massive scam.

> If they were worried about running out of VC money, going to the public (the P in IPO) would be the move.

Yes? They were geared up for IPO this year until pushing it back. See all the marketing shenanigans around solving mathematics for this month's flavour. They have a balancing act to manage between the hype and the reality of the business.

Anthropic appears to have found a path to profitability: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/17/anthropic...

Anthropic likely would not be saying, in October, that they planned to go public next month, if this were also true of their business.

In the last ~month, OpenAI announced a delay to its IPO and Anthropic put a relatively near-term range on its IPO date. These are very different signals.

Yep, I agree. The only 'frontier' any of the big labs are racing towards is the frontier of financial ruin.

IPO = It's Probably Overpriced.

The reason is that companies can choose the best timing to go public - when their financial look the best - and they do. Anthropic trying to go public very soon is a good tell their financial look pretty decent. OpenAI postponing the IPO is a very good tell theirs look bad.