OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 on May 22; Anthropic's new round pushes it to a ~$900B valuation, past OpenAI, targeting an October listing. An IPO is both a liquidity event and a pricing event: for the first time, the public market — not VCs — prices frontier AI, and it prices on cash, not narrative. The starting gun isn't the finish line. The race that matters runs on the application layer, not the foundation models.