Bloomberg: OpenAI bought back roughly $7B of employee shares itself at a $852B valuation.

That differs from earlier employee sales, where outside investors including SoftBank and Thrive Capital bought the stock.

For current and former employees, the tender converts part of their private-company equity into cash without waiting for a public listing.

OpenAI's previous major employee sale moved about $6.6B of stock to investors at a $500B valuation, making the latest transaction both larger in valuation and fundamentally different in who supplied the liquidity.