OpenAI eyes $500 billion valuation in new share sale talks: Reports

OpenAI is in talks with investors about a secondary share sale that could value the artificial intelligence company at $500 billion, nearly doubling its current $300 billion valuation and positioning it as the world’s most valuable private tech firm, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The deal would place OpenAI ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was recently valued at around $400 billion, the report said.

According to the FT, the proposed transaction would allow current and former OpenAI employees to sell their shares. While the size and price of the offering are not final, it could exceed the $1.5 billion stock sale OpenAI conducted late last year.

The company, which is backed by Microsoft, is reportedly in discussions with several investors including Thrive Capital.

OpenAI on Tuesday also released its first open artificial intelligence models since the launch of ChatGPT, introducing two "open-weight" systems – gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b – designed for developers. While not fully open-source, the models are designed for developers to run locally and customise, offering a transparent alternative to the company’s closed systems.

“gpt-oss is a big deal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X. “It is a state-of-the-art open-weights reasoning model, with strong real-world performance comparable to o4-mini, that you can run locally on your own computer (or phone with the smaller size). We believe this is the best and most usable open model in the world.”

OpenAI had twice delayed the release of these models to conduct additional safety tests. In internal trials, the company developed adversarial versions of the models to evaluate misuse scenarios, including biosecurity threats, and shared results with external experts for review.

Altman added that the models are the result of “billions of dollars of research” and are designed to empower individuals and boost privacy by giving users direct control. “Although we believe most people will want to use a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to.”