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OpenAI has just closed one of the largest employee stock sales in its history, and this time the company paid for it entirely out of its own pocket.
OpenAI completed a $7 billion secondary share sale on Monday, giving current and former employees a chance to sell a portion of their stock. The deal valued the AI company at $852 billion, the same price set during its funding round in March.
A secondary share sale, often called a tender offer, lets employees sell existing shares to a buyer instead of waiting for a public listing. It does not raise new money for the company. Instead, it gives staff a way to turn stock compensation into cash while OpenAI remains private.
What makes this tender different is who paid for it. Instead of bringing in outside investors to buy the shares, OpenAI used its own cash to repurchase them. That keeps the ownership list simpler and avoids letting a new investor set a fresh price for the stock ahead of a public listing.
OpenAI has run tenders like this before:
- A $1.5 billion tender offer in 2024
- A $6.6 billion tender in October 2025, at a $500 billion valuation, backed by investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX, and T. Rowe Price
- This week’s $7 billion tender, at an $852 billion valuation, funded internally
That last point stands out. Every prior tender came with a higher valuation than the one before it. This is the first time the number has stayed flat.
OpenAI confidentially filed paperwork for a U.S. initial public offering in June, without giving a public timeline for when it might actually list.
Reports from earlier this year point to disagreement inside the company over timing. Chief Executive Sam Altman has reportedly pushed for a listing as early as the fourth quarter of 2026, aiming for a valuation near $1 trillion. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has reportedly argued for waiting until 2027, pointing to roughly $600 billion in future infrastructure spending commitments and concerns about whether the company is ready to meet the reporting standards required of a public company.
A flat valuation and a self-funded buyback do not confirm which side is winning that debate. But several industry observers see both as signs that a near-term IPO is not locked in. Bringing in outside investors would have created a new price benchmark ahead of a public listing. Avoiding that step gives OpenAI more room to decide its IPO price later, on its own terms.
OpenAI’s growth remains rapid by almost any measure. As of its March funding round, the company reported about $2 billion in monthly revenue, more than 900 million weekly active users, and roughly 50 million paying subscribers.
The company is still not profitable, though. It is reportedly on track to lose close to $14 billion in 2026, and it is not expected to turn cash flow positive until sometime between 2029 and 2030. Much of that spending is tied to long-term commitments for computing power and data centers, the same infrastructure that supports its growth.
Rival Anthropic is on a similar path. It has also confidentially filed for a public listing, and bankers reportedly expect whichever AI company goes public first to set the tone for how investors treat the rest of the industry.
For now, OpenAI employees have a new window to cash out part of their equity, and the company gets to keep its cap table clean ahead of a future listing. Whether that listing happens in 2026 or 2027 still appears to be an open question inside the company itself.
Investors watching the AI sector will likely treat this tender as one more data point rather than a final answer. The bigger signal will come when OpenAI either sets a public IPO timeline or runs another tender at a valuation that finally moves.
