OpenAI submitted confidential IPO paperwork to the SEC on Monday, the company confirmed. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are advising on a potential listing that could come as soon as the autumn, according to people familiar with the matter.

The filing makes OpenAI the third major AI-adjacent company to move towards public markets in a single week. Anthropic filed confidentially last week at a $965 billion private valuation. SpaceX, which now includes xAI, is expected to begin trading on Thursday at roughly $1.8 trillion.

OpenAI’s hedged language

“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,” OpenAI said in a statement. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

The company is also planning a tender sale of shares in the coming weeks to provide liquidity to employees before any public listing. OpenAI completed a $122 billion funding round in March at an $852 billion valuation, the largest private raise in history.

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The competitive pressure

Anthropic’s valuation leapt past OpenAI’s for the first time in its latest private round, hitting $965 billion as its revenue surged. That reversal, combined with SpaceX’s imminent $1.8 trillion listing, creates pressure for OpenAI to establish a public-market benchmark before its competitors define the terms.

OpenAI has told investors it plans to spend roughly $600 billion on AI infrastructure by 2030. That kind of capital requirement is difficult to fund indefinitely through private rounds, even at OpenAI’s scale.

The challenges in the filing

The S-1, when it becomes public, will need to address several known issues. OpenAI reportedly missed certain internal revenue and user growth targets. Several key executives have departed or stepped back from their roles.

The company’s restructuring from a non-profit to a for-profit entity is ongoing, and the failed Musk lawsuit to block the conversion, while legally resolved, surfaced internal documents that will be scrutinised by public-market investors.

Three IPOs, one question

The convergence of OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX in public markets within months of each other will test whether investor appetite for AI is deep enough to absorb three mega-listings simultaneously. SpaceX alone is seeking $75 billion.

If all three succeed, AI companies will have raised more capital from public markets in a single year than in the entire history of the sector. If demand falters, the one that files last will pay the highest price for waiting.

Layoffs commonly stemmed from AI, offshoring and restructuring

More white-collar workers are turning to unions and trade associations for help after losing their jobs.

The National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has also seen more cases of retrenchments due to business restructuring recently, said its assistant secretary-general Patrick Tay.

NTUC handled over 3,900 retrenchment and termination-related cases for professionals, managers and executives (PMEs), up 5% from 2024.

Some cases stemmed from offshoring and relocation as companies cut costs, Tay told The Straits Times in an interview. In some instances, roles are being shifted out of Singapore “even when local PMEs are experienced and capable,” he said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also emerging as a factor, though economy-wide data remains limited. “We are also seeing businesses cite investments in AI as a factor for workforce restructuring,” said Tay. “Some workers find themselves displaced because job roles are changing faster than they can adapt.”

The figures cover cases handled across NTUC’s 58 affiliated trade unions and six trade associations, including the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management@NTUC. They exclude cases from its Employment and Employability Institute (e2i).

While total employment in Singapore has grown and the unemployment rate has remained low at 2% in 2024 and 2025, retrenchments have increased over the past few years from 6,440 in 2022 to 13,020 in 2024 and 14,400 in 2025.

Many workers still not aware of unions that can represent them

Tay said that NTUC is concerned that many PMEs are still not aware that they can join unions and be represented by labour movements during retrenchments.

It is particularly worried about those in the professional services, finance and infocomm and technology sectors as they are most exposed to the effects of generative AI at work, said the Pioneer MP, who is also director of strategy and legal at NTUC.

NTUC is working to do more for PMEs, said Tay, noting that unions’ scope to represent them has widened over time. Previously, PMEs could only be represented individually on limited matters. But 2015 amendments to the Industrial Relations Act expanded this, allowing rank-and-file unions to represent them collectively as a class.

Now, only employees with clear conflicts of interest—such as those involved in hiring and firing, or with access to confidential personnel and budget information—are excluded from union representation during retrenchment.

As industries transform and PMEs face growing retrenchment exposure, NTUC is pushing for stronger protections, Tay said. This includes advocating in Parliament for earlier retrenchment notices and broader access to the SkillsFuture Jobseekers’ Support Scheme for the involuntarily unemployed.

NTUC is also working with the Government and employers on the Employment Act review, hoping provisions can extend further to PMEs, he added.

“We’re trying to get more of the PMEs to be aware that they can be part of a union and that actually we can represent them,” he added.

Companies can do more to alleviate the repercussions of retrenchment

Labour economist Walter Theseira warned that mandating additional worker protections could make Singapore’s labour market more rigid and hurt competitiveness. But he also acknowledged that workers are currently “too exposed to the risks of retrenchment.”

The Singapore University of Social Sciences associate professor also noted that benefits are not legally mandated, but subject to the solvency of a company and its willingness to pay.

“The presumption that PMEs can ‘self-insure’ places a burden on families to set aside substantial savings in case of retrenchment,” he said.

Unemployment benefits in the form of the Jobseekers’ Support Scheme are also currently too limited to lower-income workers, Theseira added.

As such, Theseira suggested that including higher-income workers with larger payout levels through a scheme jointly funded by workers and employers could be useful.

Another solution the professor posited was retrenchment benefit insurance that companies are required to contribute to, which could also be useful in providing guaranteed benefits.

A risk-pooled retrenchment benefits system could be more efficient than leaving workers to fend for themselves, he added, with safeguards to encourage reskilling and job search while receiving support.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

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OpenAI announced on Monday that it confidentially filed for an IPO, marking what could become one of the defining public offerings of the decade. And then there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other company, Tools for Humanity, which is reportedly conducting layoffs, according to Business Insider. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for confirmation.

You might know Tools for Humanity better through its verification project known as World — and its related device, a creepy silver orb that wants to scan your eyeballs. The idea is that the company will be able to verify people’s identities using unique iris scans, helping to distinguish human activity from bot activity in the increasingly automated world that Tools for Humanity co-founder and chairman Altman is constructing. The company would also use these scans to validate people’s identities to support the trade of its own cryptocurrency, Worldcoin.

These vague, suspicious ambitions were enough to raise money at a $2.5 billion valuation from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and other funds backing blockchain companies. But now the company is reportedly downsizing as it struggles to create revenue.

In the U.S., companies like Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign have partnered on Altman’s side project. Internationally, Tools for Humanity has faced regulatory and ethical concerns. In Kenya, India, and Hong Kong, for example, people were offered the equivalent of $50 in Worldcoin in exchange for their biometric data. Kenya later banned World from operating in the country, citing privacy and financial concerns; meanwhile, South Korea fined the company $830,000 for allegedly violating local privacy law.

Who would’ve thought? People don’t feel great about giving their biometric data to a startup in exchange for $50 worth of crypto.

‘There are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company’, says OpenAI.

OpenAI has confidentially filed to go public, but said it could be a “while” before it ceases to be a private company.

“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,” OpenAI said in a short statement yesterday (8 June). “But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Estimates from last year suggest an initial public offering (IPO) could value the ChatGPT-maker at up to $1trn, in one of the largest listings in history. The company, at the time, was expected to raise at least $60bn in the IPO.

While newer reports suggest that the company is also in talks with the US government in the hope that it purchases some of its shares once it goes public.

The IPO announcement comes just days after the $852bn AI company’s fiercest rival Anthropic also filed to go public.

Meanwhile, the tug of war for the biggest IPO raise is currently led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is expected to raise a targeted $75bn in its listing. The X and xAI parent company filed for an IPO late last month.

Anthropic – currently more valuable than OpenAI at $965bn – has been encroaching on its enterprise customer base, with reports from earlier this year finding that the Claude-parent was capturing a significant portion of first-time enterprise AI customers over OpenAI.

As a countermeasure, OpenAI is reportedly working on the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since its launch in 2022 to better compete with Anthropic, which has held a narrower focus on its enterprise business.

According to reports, the new desktop ‘superapp’ will focus strongly on OpenAI’s coding tool Codex, a move that reflects shifting interests from AI chatbots to agents that perform tasks for users. The app will also feature the AI chatbot, as well as the AI-powered browser Atlas.

OpenAI executives view ChatGPT as an introductory tool to encourage pick-up of higher-value products. The changes are expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks.

The company has also made big name hires to develop its “next generation of personal agents”, while shutting down less profitable ventures such as its Sora video generation model.

A majority of OpenAI’s 1bn monthly active ChatGPT customers use the free version of the tool. The company has between 5m and 9m business users, according to different blogs on its website, while the Financial Times reports that it has 2m businesses under its wing and 5m weekly active Codex users.

The company expects revenue from its business customers, which represents 40pc of its total revenue, to grow to 50pc by the end of the year.

Still, OpenAI is far from being profitable, making around $13bn in revenue last year with a planned spending of about $600bn by 2030.

Sources told CNBC earlier this year that the company projects its total revenue for 2030 to be more than $280bn – nearly 20-times its 2025 earnings – with near equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses.

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