Altman says OpenAI won't go public this year, citing safety
Sam Altman said an IPO would come at the wrong moment while safety is being debated. He also hinted that leading labs are close to an agreement to slow down.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company will not go public in 2026. In an interview with Fortune on Friday he pointed to the safety debate: "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that."
Asked whether that pushes the listing to 2027, he said: "I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together." OpenAI had already filed confidentially for an IPO.
A slowdown pact on the table
In the same interview Altman suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI companies may be close to announcing an agreement to slow development and address safety risks together. He said the company has discussed pausing as it reaches new capability levels, and that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability.
He also referred to OpenAI's split non-profit and for-profit structure: "We have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time, and this moment that we're in now is kind of why. We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders."
Backing Amodei
The comments came right after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote. Altman replied on X: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks."
Earlier in the week a researcher resigned from Anthropic and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of acting irresponsibly. According to The Guardian, lawmakers from both US parties are now calling for new rules.
Valuation and Anthropic
The New York Times reported in June that OpenAI was leaning toward pushing its IPO, which could value it at around $1 trillion, into next year. The safety debate has not changed Anthropic's own plans so far: according to Reuters' sources, it is expected to start marketing its IPO in mid-October at the earliest and list days before the US midterm elections in November.
Sources: Fortune, The Guardian, TechCrunch.
