SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI, the company behind the AI systems that have simultaneously revolutionized productivity and convinced most of the population that robots will one day harvest their souls, confirmed this week it is taking early steps toward a public listing after surpassing $25 billion in annualized revenue — a milestone that Wall Street called “extraordinary” and that 90% of ordinary Americans called “terrifying, actually.”
The IPO preparations come amid a broader AI industry boom that has seen the sector’s leading companies generate unprecedented revenues while managing to convince barely one in ten Americans that any of this is a net positive for humanity. Analysts say this gap between financial performance and public enthusiasm is “a fascinating dynamic” and “probably fine.”
“The business fundamentals are exceptional,” one venture capitalist told Globe News Daily from inside a car that was driving itself. “People are scared, yes, but scared people still use the product. In many cases, they use it more.”
OpenAI’s $25 billion revenue milestone places it comfortably ahead of rival Anthropic, which is approaching $19 billion, and far ahead of any of the companies that humans remember fondly from their childhoods and which are mostly now defunct. The AI arms race, experts note, has been fueled partly by surging electricity demand that utility companies plan to meet with $1.4 trillion in infrastructure spending over five years — a sum that several climate scientists described as “at least being for electricity and not, like, diesel.”
A new Stanford AI Index report noted that as of 2026, the best AI models now exceed 50% accuracy on advanced benchmarks, a fact that AI companies presented as a triumph and that everyone else presented as a reminder that the models are still wrong half the time.
The public listing announcement prompted immediate interest from investors, who noted that the fear premium built into AI-adjacent stocks has historically proven “very lucrative.” Shares in companies that claim some kind of AI connection have surged, including one firm whose only AI feature is an autocomplete function in its customer service chatbot.
“I am very excited about this IPO,” a retail investor told Globe News Daily. “I am also deeply worried about the future of human civilization. These feelings coexist in me without apparent contradiction. I have maxed out my ISA.”
OpenAI declined to comment on the IPO timeline but released a statement saying it remained “committed to the safe and beneficial development of AI for humanity,” which market analysts noted is “standard language” and that the underwriters have already priced in.
At press time, the Nasdaq had risen for its tenth consecutive day, AI stocks were near record highs, and a chatbot had written the first draft of this article before our correspondent realized and started over from scratch.
Globe News Daily editorial note: This article was written entirely by a human journalist, who would like that noted in the record for posterity. The human is fine. Totally fine.
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