The company is in early discussions about a possible sale of stock for current and former employees, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Aug. 6), citing sources briefed on the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s investment talks.
These sources said OpenAI is eyeing a secondary stock sale in the billions of dollars. If the deal proceeds, Bloomberg notes, it would raise OpenAI’s valuation by around two-thirds. The company was last valued at $300 billion, and recently raised $8.3 billion from a group of investors for a second tranche of its $40 billion financing round.
PYMNTS has reached out to OpenAI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
The Bloomberg report points out that the potential share sale is happening in the wake of OpenAI losing several researchers to Meta as the latter company spends heavily to bolster its “superintelligence” AI team. Thus, the secondary sale could provide an incentive for workers to stay with OpenAI, the report added.
Meanwhile, OpenAI rival Anthropic was aiming for a $170 billion valuation in a new $5 billion funding round, according to published reports last month. That figure would place the startup among the world’s most valuable privately held tech firms, along with OpenAI and SpaceX.
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This week saw the competing AI firms introduce new models, announcing the GPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic) iterations within hours of each other Tuesday (Aug. 5).
OpenAI unveiled two open-weight reasoning models to counter the rise of Meta and DeepSeek.
As PYMNTS reported, these models are only somewhat open, as developers do not get the source code or training data.
OpenAI’s new gpt-oss models are available in two sizes: 120 billion and 20 billion parameters, or the statistical relationships learned by a model during training. Typically, the higher the parameter count, the more capable the model, the report added.
“We believe this is the best and most usable open model in the world,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X.
Anthropic on Tuesday debuted Claude Opus 4.1, which the company said is better at agentic tasks, coding and reasoning.
Mike Krieger, the company’s chief product officer, told Bloomberg this release is different from past model unveilings.
“In the past, we were too focused on only shipping the really big upgrades,” Krieger said.
