OpenAI in Talks for Share Sale at $500 Billion Valuation

OpenAI is in early talks about a potential sale of stock for current and former employees at a valuation of about $500 billion, people briefed on the investment discussions said, marking an enormous gain in value for the artificial intelligence leader.

The company is targeting a secondary stock sale in the billions of dollars, the people said, asking to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Existing investors including Thrive Capital have approached OpenAI about buying some of the employee shares, the people said.

If the deal goes ahead, it would elevate OpenAI’s on-paper price tag by roughly two-thirds. Its previous valuation stood at $300 billion in a $40 billion financing round led by SoftBank Group Corp. — making it one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Representatives for OpenAI and Thrive declined to comment.

Shirin Ghaffary reports.

The latest move follows news last week the startup had secured $8.3 billion from a syndicate of investors for a second tranche of that $40 billion financing, which was oversubscribed by about five times, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. OpenAI managed to snag that funding ahead of schedule, the person said.

Major US startups often negotiate share sales for their employees as a way to reward and retain staff, and also attract external investors. The company run by Sam Altman is looking to leverage investor demand to provide employees with liquidity that reflects the company’s growth, according to one of the people familiar with the investment negotiations.

In recent months, OpenAI lost several members of its research staff to Meta Platforms Inc. as the latter firm aggressively recruited top talent from Apple Inc. and other competitors for its “superintelligence” AI team, offering pay packages in the nine-figure range. A secondary sale for OpenAI could serve as a way to incentivize staff to remain at the company who are being offered lavish compensation.

OpenAI also faces mounting competitive pressure from rival AI startups. Anthropic, founded by former employees of OpenAI, is nearing a deal to raise as much as $5 billion in a new round of funding that would value it at $170 billion, Bloomberg News has reported. Elon Musk is also said to be seeking a valuation of as much as $200 billion for his startup, xAI.

OpenAI, whose ChatGPT ushered in a new era of AI development, has overseen a spate of major recent technology launches.

Those include a pair of open and freely available artificial intelligence models that can mimic the human process of reasoning, months after China’s DeepSeek gained global attention with its own open AI software. It’s now preparing the release of its latest GPT-5 model, aimed at shoring up OpenAI’s lead in an increasingly competitive sphere. OpenAI is also providing access to its ChatGPT product to US federal agencies at a nominal cost of $1 a year as part of a push to get its AI chatbot more widely adopted.

The startup has announced it expects ChatGPT to reach 700 million weekly active users this week, up from 500 million at the end of March. The app also recently crossed 3 billion user messages a day. And in May, it unveiled plans to acquire the AI device startup co-founded by Apple veteran Jony Ive in a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal, joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware.

It’s also facing a number of challenges. OpenAI’s currently in separate discussions about its future as a for-profit company, a negotiation that’s dragged on for months.

Microsoft Corp., which backed OpenAI with some $13.75 billion and has the right to use its intellectual property, is the biggest holdout among the ChatGPT maker’s investors, Bloomberg previously reported. At issue is the size of Microsoft’s stake in a newly configured company.

The talks have since broadened into a renegotiation of their relationship, with the software maker seeking to avoid suddenly losing access to the startup’s technology before the end of the current deal, which expires in 2030.

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