Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on July 8, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
OpenAI is preparing to sell around $6 billion in stock as part of a secondary sale that would value the company at roughly $500 billion, CNBC confirmed Friday.
The shares would be sold by current and former employees to investors including SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named due to the confidential nature of the discussions. The talks are still in early stages and the details could change.
Bloomberg was first to report the discussions. All three firms are existing investors in OpenAI, but Thrive Capital could lead the round, as CNBC previously reported. SoftBank, Dragoneer and Thrive Capital did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
OpenAI’s valuation has grown exponentially since the artificial intelligence startup launched its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022.
The company announced a $40 billion funding round in March at a $300 billion, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private tech company. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced its most recent $8.3 billion in fresh capital tied to that funding round.
Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale AI model. OpenAI said the model is smarter, faster and “a lot more useful,” particularly across domains like writing, coding and health care. But it’s been a rocky roll out, as some users complained about losing access to OpenAI’s prior models.
“We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on X.
WATCH: OpenAI staffer reportedly to sell $6 billion in stock to SoftBank and other investors