OpenAI has entered what CEO Sam Altman calls "Phase 3," a fundamental shift from building cutting-edge AI systems to making them cheap, accessible, and useful for everyone on the planet. The company filed confidential IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, June 9, 2026, signaling its readiness to go public while simultaneously unveiling an ambitious vision that extends far beyond Wall Street.

The timing is striking. OpenAI's IPO filing comes just one week after rival Anthropic filed its own confidential paperwork, and both companies are now racing toward public markets alongside Elon Musk's SpaceX, which is targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. Yet Altman's latest manifesto suggests OpenAI is thinking about something bigger than shareholder returns: democratizing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a form of AI that can match or exceed human cognitive abilities across a wide range of tasks.

What Does OpenAI's "Phase 3" Actually Mean?

OpenAI's first phase focused purely on AI research. The second phase began when that research became real products, most notably ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022 and quickly became the fastest-growing application in history. Phase 3 represents something fundamentally different: the company is no longer trying to build the smartest AI or the most advanced product. Instead, it wants to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it.

In a blog post published the same day as the IPO filing, Altman and OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki compared AI's potential impact to the commercialization of electricity in the early 20th century. Just as electricity eventually became widely available and transformed everyday life, they argue, AI should become a utility that anyone can access and use.

The company outlined three concrete goals for this phase:

• Automated AI Researchers: Building AI systems capable of accelerating and increasingly automating the research process itself, with the internal belief that by March 2028 a significant fraction of OpenAI's research could be done by AI systems working alongside human researchers.
• Economic and Scientific Progress: Using AI to accelerate breakthroughs in science and economic growth, helping solve real-world problems from understanding medical bills to starting small businesses.
• Personal AGI for Everyone: Giving every person on Earth access to their own personal AGI, fundamentally reshaping how individuals work, learn, and solve problems in their daily lives.

Why Is OpenAI Going Public Now?

OpenAI's IPO filing doesn't mean the company will hit the stock market immediately. In its announcement, the company stated: "We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best".

However, the filing signals that going public is now part of the company's long-term strategy. OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar explained in April that the company is already "acting with the good hygiene of a public company," measuring revenue the way publicly traded firms report earnings to the SEC. She noted that OpenAI's current valuation of $852 billion would make it one of the 15 biggest companies in the S&P 500 if it went public today.

"I want us to be ready. I think it's good to be able to tap the public markets. They're much bigger than the private markets," Friar told the Associated Press.

Sarah Friar, Chief Financial Officer at OpenAI

The company faces fierce competition from Anthropic, maker of the increasingly popular Claude chatbot, and Google's Gemini AI assistant. According to Emarketer analyst Nate Elliott, OpenAI appears to be losing ChatGPT's strong early leads with consumers and businesses to these rivals, making access to enormous capital through an IPO increasingly important.

How Does OpenAI's IPO Plan Connect to Public Wealth?

Altman's Phase 3 vision arrives at a moment when the politics around AI wealth are shifting dramatically. President Donald Trump recently suggested that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in leading AI companies, telling reporters aboard Air Force One: "There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner".

This idea has gained unusual bipartisan support. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a one-off 50 percent tax on AI companies' profits, while Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, argued the government should force AI companies to hand over 50 percent of their equity. OpenAI has been privately pitching the idea of government ownership to administration officials since early 2025, and Altman revisited it with senior officials in Washington this week.

OpenAI's proposed framework, branded a "Public Wealth Fund," would involve companies voluntarily donating a small equity stake, estimated between 1 and 5 percent, to the federal government. The fund "could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth, regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital," according to OpenAI's April 2026 policy proposal.

The timing of this proposal is strategic. Donating a small equity slice before an IPO costs relatively little and buys significant political goodwill at a moment when AI companies face growing public anxiety about job displacement and wealth concentration. Interestingly, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic was caught off guard by Trump's announcement and is not currently having conversations with the administration about providing equity.

What Challenges Lie Ahead for Phase 3?

Despite the ambitious vision, significant obstacles remain. OpenAI has not yet publicly disclosed how much money it is making or when it plans to turn a profit. Much like Anthropic and SpaceX, the company has been losing more money than it makes because of the huge costs of building out the venture.

Additionally, both the Trump administration's voluntary equity-donation framework and Sanders' compulsory 50 percent equity transfer face serious implementation problems. Neither proposal has resolved basic governance questions: who sits on the fund's board, whether it holds shares passively or with voting rights, and how an "AI dividend" would actually reach American households.

The Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil revenues annually to state residents, is the closest domestic model, but it operates at the state level with a straightforward asset base. A nationally administered fund holding equity in loss-making, pre-IPO technology companies is a very different proposition. For OpenAI specifically, a donated equity stake has no agreed market price until the IPO, meaning the fund's actual value at the moment of contribution is genuinely uncertain.

Despite these challenges, there appears to be cross-party support for some form of public ownership. Hamza Chaudhry, AI and national security lead at the Future of Life Institute, explained that what is striking about this moment is that leading progressive Democrats and the Trump administration are converging on the same basic intuition: that AI's trajectory is "inseparable from the public interest, and that the wealth it generates cannot simply accrue to a handful of private actors".

Hamza Chaudhry, AI and national security lead at the Future of Life Institute

As OpenAI moves toward its Phase 3 vision and prepares for a potential IPO, the company is betting that making AI accessible to everyone, while sharing some of the wealth it generates, is not just good policy but good business. Whether that bet pays off will depend on both market conditions and the company's ability to deliver on promises that have captured the imagination of policymakers, investors, and the public alike.