OpenAI is reportedly in early talks about a sale of shares held by current and former employees that would value it at half a trillion dollars, overtaking Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
If the transaction goes ahead, the value of the ChatGPT developer would rise by about two-thirds, from $300bn (£225bn).
Musk’s rocket companyis currently worth $350bn and is reportedly circling a $400bn price tag in a new fundraising.
Bloomberg, which first reported the OpenAI talks, said existing investors, including Thrive Capital, have approached the company about buying employee shares. Other investors in OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, include the Japanese investment company SoftBank, which led the $300bn financing, and Microsoft.
OpenAI and Thrive Capital declined to comment
Tech startups are known to arrange employee share sales to motivate staff and bring in investors.
OpenAI is also under competitive pressure from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to retain leading staff members, with a share sale possibly offering an incentive to stay. The Facebook parent has poached staff from OpenAI and others in a hiring drive to build an AI “superintelligence” unit.
OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, has said Meta had taken “none of our best people” despite offering “crazy” signing bonuses of $100m (£74m).
Anthropic, another rival, founded by former OpenAI employees, is reportedly in negotiations for a fundraising valuing the business at $170bn. Fundraising is a continuing requirement for AI startups as they seek finance to train the increasingly sophisticated models that power their products, a process that involves using expensive computer chips and data centre capacity.
The report comes as Altman indicated that OpenAI was preparing to release an upgraded version of the model powering ChatGPT. On Sunday he shared a screenshot of what appeared to be the company’s latest AI model, GPT-5.
OpenAI also launched two new open models on Tuesday, meaning they can be downloaded freely and customised, in a competitive challenge to Meta and China’s DeepSeek, which have also launched open AI models.
“We’re excited to make this model, the result of billions of dollars of research, available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible,” said Altman.
However, OpenAI’s main business is based on “closed” models, whose inner workings cannot be accessed, and it charges for subscriptions for enhanced versions of ChatGPT or for integrating its models into businesses.
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OpenAI, which is structured as a non-profit entity with a profit-making arm, is in talks to become a for-profit business, with the long-running negotiations yet to conclude amid reports of wrangling with Microsoft.
Speaking to the New York Times podcast in June, Altman said of the Microsoft relationship: “Obviously in any deep partnership there are points of tension, and we certainly have those. But on the whole it’s been like really wonderfully good for both companies.”
In March a US judge denied Musk’s request for a preliminary injunction to pause OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit model. Musk, the world’s richest person, was a co-founder of OpenAI and left the company in 2019 – but has accused the startup of straying from its founding mission to develop artificial intelligence for the good of humanity, rather than for corporate profit.
OpenAI is also pushing into hardware after buying a startup, io, owned by the iPhone designer Sir Jony Ive in a $6.4bn deal. Altman reportedly told employees that OpenAI planned to build 100m AI “companions” that would be part of users’ everyday life.
Mass production of the unnamed io gadget is not expected to start until 2027, although Altman has described a prototype as “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen”.