OpenAI is in early discussions to organise a secondary share sale that would let current and former staff sell roughly $6 billion of stock to investors including SoftBank Group, Thrive Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group. The transaction under consideration would value the generative-AI company at about $500 billion, people familiar with the talks said. The proposed deal would give employees liquidity without diluting existing shareholders, while positioning Microsoft-backed OpenAI ahead of SpaceX as the world’s most valuable privately held start-up. A $500 billion price tag would mark a sharp rise from the $300 billion valuation attached to a $40 billion primary funding round announced in March. OpenAI’s rapid ascent is underpinned by surging demand for its ChatGPT and GPT-5 models. Reuters has reported that the company doubled revenue in the first seven months of the year, reaching an annualised run-rate of about $12 billion, and now counts roughly 700 million weekly active users. Negotiations over the secondary sale could still change in size or terms.