Call it the season of IPO prep. Recent launches and announcements from OpenAI and arch rival Anthropic are aimed at laying the groundwork to go public in late 2026 or early 2027, and for OpenAI, which just closed a $122 billion funding round that values it at $852 billion, everything is riding on a model codenamed Spud.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman needs a big win. ChatGPT has been losing consumer market share to Google’s Gemini, while its enterprise business has been squeezed by Anthropic, whose Claude Cowork service caused a stock market freakout in January.

© Bloomberg