OpenAI tees up mega-IPO while igniting price war and agentic commerce push

OpenAI is barrelling towards a stock-market debut, with chief executive Sam Altman telling staff this week that he expects the artificial intelligence company to go public “within the next year.” The ChatGPT maker confirmed on Monday that it had confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, joining rival Anthropic in a sprint to the public markets. Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion — a figure that would make it the most valuable listed tech firm in history. Viewed from California, the timeline remains elastic: Altman cautioned that “many things could cause it to be sooner or later in that range, but filing now gives us optionality if we want to go sooner.” [A1] [A6]

The IPO manoeuvre comes against the backdrop of an intensifying price war. OpenAI is exploring cuts to the token-based fees that underpin its services, including ChatGPT, according to people familiar with the plans. The move is seen as a pre-emptive strike against similar reductions expected from Anthropic, the San Francisco-based rival behind the Claude chatbot. Analysts in Latin America note that a race to the bottom on pricing suggests both companies are willing to sacrifice short-term margins to lock in enterprise and consumer users before their stock-market curtains rise. [A3]

Meanwhile, OpenAI is positioning itself as the financial plumbing of a new era of agentic commerce. Visa announced a partnership this week that will allow AI agents powered by OpenAI’s platform to execute online purchases through Visa’s payments infrastructure. Catalina Tobar, Visa’s head of digital products for Latin America, said the alliance is designed for a world where consumers “delegate more and more purchase decisions to intelligent assistants.” This vision extends beyond banking: during the holiday shopping season, major retailers from Walmart to Amazon have deployed AI shopping assistants capable of personalised recommendations and autonomous ordering, with OpenAI’s own ChatGPT and Google Gemini joining the fray. [A2] [A5]

The commercial sprint sits uneasily alongside a newly hawkish safety message. Both OpenAI and Anthropic, eyeing the crucial gatekeeping role of institutional investors, have sharpened their warnings about “recursive self-improvement” — a scenario where AI systems design the next generation of technology with scant human oversight. OpenAI explicitly predicted last week that this threshold could be crossed by March 2028. Critics, including voices in London’s tech-governance circles, dismiss the warnings as “fear-mongering” calibrated to reassure Wall Street that the companies are responsible stewards of transformational technology, even as they race to monetise it. [A4]

For global investors, the picture is one of breakneck speed on multiple fronts: a dash towards a public listing, a price war to dominate market share, a push into autonomous payments that could redefine retail, and a rhetorical campaign to frame existential risk as a reason to back the frontrunners. Whether this balancing act will withstand the scrutiny of public markets remains an open question, but the next twelve months promise to be the most consequential in the short history of commercial AI.