Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025. <\/p>\n
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Reports that OpenAI is set to confidentially file for an IPO<\/a> as soon as Friday changed prediction market traders’ outlook on which private AI giant will debut on the public markets first.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Traders on Kalshi now see OpenAI as the favorite to go public before Anthropic, giving it an 83% chance of getting the big payday first.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Getting to public markets first is very important, given this arms race going on,” said Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ global head of technology research. “It sets a valuation, you’re the first one to meet with investors on the road, and there’s an advantage.”<\/p>\n Before the initial report on the IPO timeline by the Wall Street Journal<\/a> which CNBC later confirmed, traders gave OpenAI just over a 32% chance of beating its chief private rival to the public markets. <\/p>\n Chances Anthropic would beat OpenAI to an IPO collapsed on Polymarket to 20% from 69%.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the birth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched the AI bull market in November 2022, the company has lost some of its shine with investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Worries about the company’s spending<\/a>, reports on missed revenue and growth targets<\/a> and leadership turnover<\/a> weighed on investors’ outlooks. There have even been internal disagreements on the timeline to go public, according to the Journal<\/a>, with CEO Sam Altman pushing for a faster debut than CFO Sarah Friar.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the same time, Anthropic’s enterprise business has led it to experience massive growth in recent months, and reportedly is in talks with investors for a new funding round that would value the company at $900 billion<\/a>, greater than that of OpenAI’s latest valuation.<\/p>\n Investors became enchanted with Anthropic’s Claude models, which have been constantly updated with new versions<\/a>. Those updates were followed so closely by investors that they consistently moved the stock market<\/a> in the beginning of the year, as worries about how new tools from Claude models would disrupt existing businesses mounted.<\/p>\n It was in late March when reports about an extremely powerful new model<\/a>, Claude Mythos, circulated that Anthropic took a consistent lead over OpenAI on Kalshi of who would have a public debut first. Bloomberg reported around the same time that the company was looking to IPO as soon as October<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n But with an IPO on the way \u2014 sooner than prediction market traders thought \u2014 and a court win against Elon Musk this week, it could be the moment for a turnaround, according to Ives.<\/p>\n “It started with the lawsuit,” he said. “And now filing the IPO, that’s a great one-two punch to start to put water on the negative fire that’s been on them.”<\/p>\n Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment.<\/p>\n