Markets JUN 27, 2026

OpenAI weighs 2027 IPO as Anthropic readies October debut; Goldman, Morgan Stanley fall 4%

Bankers cite SpaceX post-IPO slide and tech volatility as ChatGPT maker pushes listing past fall 2026. SoftBank, underwriters slump on the news.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley fell more than 4% Friday after reporting that OpenAI is leaning toward pushing its public listing into 2027, slipping past the fall 2026 window underwriters had been quietly modeling. The KBW Bank Index dropped as much as 1.7% before paring losses, and SoftBank slid alongside the two lead bookrunners.

The mechanics tell the story. OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC on June 8; Anthropic filed at the start of the month and is now eyeing an October debut. Bloomberg and a New York Times report citing three people involved in the company’s deliberations describe bankers pointing to SpaceX’s post-IPO slide and broader tech volatility as reason to wait. Going second, after watching Anthropic price into a jittery tape, is the kind of decision that gets framed as discipline rather than flinch.

Markets aren’t fully buying the delay narrative. Kalshi puts the probability of an OpenAI IPO announcement by March 1, 2027 at 59%, by June 2027 at 73%, with roughly one-in-three odds before January 1. That’s a wider distribution than you’d expect if 2027 were settled.

The competitive subtext is louder. Per the May 2026 Ramp AI Index, Anthropic’s business adoption rose 3.8 percentage points in April to 34.4%, while OpenAI’s fell 2.9 points to 32.3%. Anthropic has quadrupled its enterprise footprint in a year. Claude Code now authors roughly 4% of all public GitHub commits, double the prior month.

At Uber, engineers running Claude Code and Cursor with $500-to-$2,000 monthly API bills burned the company’s entire 2026 AI budget in four months. That’s the demand picture frontier labs want public-market investors to price. It’s also why the fastest-growing AI vendors on Ramp in April weren’t the labs at all but cheap-inference and model-agnostic platforms like LemonLime, OpenRouter, and Together AI, which sit between the frontier and the buyer and quietly compound on every token routed.

The 2010s taught a generation of CFOs that going public into a tech selloff resets a decade of private-market storytelling. OpenAI seems to have read the homework.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.