OpenAI reportedly wrapped up a $7 billion buyback of employee shares, TechCrunch reported, citing Bloomberg’s account of the deal. The transaction gave staff at the privately held lab a way to cash out stock compensation, and it pegged the company at $852 billion. That figure is not new: it matches the price set in OpenAI’s March fundraising round, which pulled in $122 billion for the company.
The flat number is the detail worth sitting with. Tender offers at fast growing private companies typically reprice upward between rounds, especially when the company keeps clearing revenue milestones and the broader market for AI equity keeps climbing. OpenAI’s tender landed at the same mark it hit roughly four months earlier, during a stretch when frontier lab valuations have generally moved in one direction.
Tender offers exist because staying private has stopped meaning staying illiquid. Companies that once needed a public listing to let staff sell vested shares now run structured buybacks instead, often financed by existing investors purchasing secondary stock rather than the company issuing new equity. The mechanism keeps a lab’s cap table and governance private while still paying out the people who built it, which is why OpenAI’s confidential SEC filing in June for a possible IPO reads differently against this week’s news. A company actively preparing to go public does not usually need a side channel for employee liquidity.
Sam Altman gave his own accounting of the year in a post last month, writing that the company did not have its best year, a stretch he called mostly his fault, while promising the period ahead would be stronger. The admission followed an April report from the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI missed internal revenue and user targets during its IPO preparations. A flat priced tender, arriving after that kind of self criticism, reads as a company buying time rather than one signaling fresh momentum to future public investors.
Here is a comparison worth making on our own, since neither company will draw it out loud. Anthropic, reportedly profitable since early this year and preparing its own path to a public listing, has been discussed in separate reporting at a valuation near $965 billion, well above where OpenAI’s tender just priced. In a market where AI valuations have mostly climbed, OpenAI holding flat against its own March number, while its closest rival is discussed at a higher figure, is a gap investors will notice at the next fundraising round regardless of what either company says about it.
None of this proves OpenAI’s growth has stalled. The company’s enterprise pivot and cost discipline could still justify a higher number at the next round. But founders and operators tracking IPO timing should treat this tender as a signal that OpenAI’s public debut is not imminent, and that the company would rather buy itself another few quarters of self declared momentum before it has to defend a number in front of public shareholders.
TechCrunch reported this story on August 11, 2026, citing Bloomberg’s earlier account of the deal.
