SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI completed a secondary share sale totaling roughly $7 billion Monday, allowing current and former employees to sell company stock at an $852 billion valuation.
The company used its own cash to fund the buyback rather than bringing in outside investors — a structure that keeps the cap table clean ahead of a potential public listing.
The $852 billion valuation was established in March 2026, when OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round. The tender offer has been in progress since that round closed. OpenAI confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026.
CEO Sam Altman told staff in June that he expects OpenAI to go public within the next year, though other reports suggest a possible delay into 2027. Funding the buyback internally gives the company flexibility on timing.
This is the latest in a series of employee liquidity events. In October 2025, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion tender offer at a $500 billion valuation, with Thrive Capital and SoftBank among the participants. Before that, the company ran a $1.5 billion tender in 2024 and an investor-funded tender in 2023 that tripled its valuation to $86 billion.
Rival Anthropic also conducted a tender offer in April, tied to a $30 billion funding round. That deal reportedly fell short of its target, with employees choosing to hold shares and investor demand going partly unfilled — the reverse of some earlier OpenAI tenders, where employee selling exceeded what investors wanted to absorb.
Both companies face an intensifying price war. OpenAI has been cutting prices for customers even as GPU and cloud infrastructure costs continue to rise — a squeeze that investors in either company's eventual IPO will need to price in.
Funding a $7 billion tender internally also signals that OpenAI is sitting on substantial cash following its March raise, with no immediate need for outside capital.
