Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, December 17, 2025 Real World News

Reports from the financial sector suggest that OpenAI, currently a private entity, plans to go public at a $1 trillion valuation. That would make it one of the largest initial public offerings of all time.

It’s quite a shift from the company’s founding in 2016, when it focused on open-source artificial intelligence (AI) and research.

OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has stated that an IPO is not the immediate focus, as the entity is able to raise significant capital in private markets

In fact, this year’s largest stock sale wasn’t on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq Stock Market, the Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 12. It was a $40 billion offering by OpenAI that was made available only to investors handpicked by the firm’s executive team, including Sam Altman. Fewer than 50 investors were able to buy shares.

Such undertakings are creating what critics say is a two-tiered system.

“For most Americans, the universe of stocks they can invest in is rapidly shrinking,” the Journal’s report said. “The number of public companies in the U.S. is half of its peak in the late 1990s.”

That’s not a problem for ultrawealthy who are able to buy and sell shares of the trending private companies via invite-only transactions long before they list their shares on public stock exchanges.

The Journal noted that it is “a private club of sorts, where a privileged group can obtain shares of companies still in their early growth stages. Everyone else is left with older, slower-growing names. The dynamic is exacerbating the wealth disparity in the U.S., as the growth in the net worth of the richest Americans is far outpacing all other income groups.”

As the late comedian George Carlin said long before the terms “Oligarchy” and “Deep State” were being bandied about on social media:

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins sees the two-tiered system as an existential threat to the U.S. economy. Akins is trying to entice more companies to go public and trying to open up access to private markets to a much wider group of investors.

Young companies like Intel and Apple decades ago sold shares to the public to raise money to hire employees, build factories and fund development of new products, Atkins says. “Insiders got returns, obviously, but the public really shared in those,” Atkins said. “Nowadays it’s completely reversed.”

The Journal noted: “The richest and most sophisticated investors are feasting on early shares of the most valuable private companies. And — in the interest of equal access — mom-and-pop investors are getting opportunities to buy risky private companies and sometimes wind up in trouble.”

That trillion-dollar potential, critics say, has led the Altman-led OpenAI to become more “guarded” about publishing research that reveals an inconvenient truth, that AI could be bad for the economy.

OpenAI had long published research on the potential safety and economic impact of its own technology.

The newfound censorship has become a point of frustration, leading at least two OpenAI employees working on its economic research team to quit the company, sources told Wired in a Dec. 9 report.

One of those who left OpenAI, economics researcher Tom Cunningham, wrote in his parting message shared internally that the economic research team was veering away from doing real research and instead acting like its employer’s propaganda arm.

Shortly after Cunningham’s departure, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer Jason Kwon sent a memo saying the company should “build solutions,” not just publish research on “hard subjects.”

“My POV on hard subjects is not that we shouldn’t talk about them,” Kwon wrote on Slack. “Rather, because we are not just a research institution, but also an actor in the world (the leading actor in fact) that puts the subject of inquiry (AI) into the world, we are expected to take agency for the outcomes.”

The hostility towards pursuing work that would paint AI in an unflattering light, critics say, is emblematic of OpenAI’s shift away from its non-profit and ostensibly altruist roots as it transforms instead into a global economic juggernaut.

An economist who previously worked with OpenAI and chose to remain anonymous alleged to Wired that it was increasingly publishing work that glorifies its own tech.

Cunningham isn’t the only employee to leave the company over ethical concerns of its direction.

William Saunders, a former member of OpenAI’s now-defunct “Superalignment” team, said he quit after realizing it was “prioritizing getting out newer, shinier products” over user safety.

After departing last year, former safety researcher Steven Adler has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for its risky approach to AI development, highlighting how ChatGPT appeared to be driving its users into mental crises and delusional spirals.

Wired noted that OpenAI’s former head of policy research Miles Brundage complained after leaving last year that it became “hard” to publish research “on all the topics that are important to me.”

OpenAI’s $40 billion fundraising round this spring eclipsed the largest-ever IPO by more than $10 billion. Investors included Japanese investment manager SoftBank Group, hedge fund Coatue Management, and private-equity giant Blackstone.

Earlier this year, Antonio Gracias, a close Elon Musk associate, offered accredited investors $1 billion worth of shares in SpaceX and another Musk company, his artificial intelligence startup xAI. To do so, Gracias’s fund, Valor Equity Partners, created what’s called a special-purpose vehicle to hold the stock of the Musk companies. Valor then worked with UBS Wealth Management to sell shares of the SPV to investors. Instead of owning a piece of Musk’s companies directly, the buyers got an ownership stake of an entity that owns the shares.

As for opening up private markets to more people, Atkins is joined by Wall Street in leading the charge.

“Finance executives argue that if they standardize buying shares of private companies, fees and fraud will fall and the liquidity of the market will increase. Also true: These Wall Street firms stand to collect bigger fees themselves if private markets become an even bigger business,” the Journal noted.

Atkins believes the average Joe should be able to invest in private companies just like the rich, as long as there are guardrails so they’re not just buying “the worst thing on the block” with high fees.

“Why should ordinary investors be closed off in so many ways?” Atkins asked.

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