Sam Altman told Fortune an IPO would be "ill-advised" given current AI safety demands, pushing OpenAI's potential public offering to 2027 at the earliest.
AI & Technology Business News
OpenAI will not go public in 2026, a point CEO Sam Altman made clear in an interview published by Fortune on Sept. 13. He said the current moment, with AI safety demands intensifying across the industry, made it the wrong time to pursue a stock offering.
"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," Altman told Fortune. The statement effectively delays any initial public offering to 2027 at the earliest.
Altman said the company had more pressing work ahead. He described that work as meeting the demands of safety and alignment, and figuring out how the AI industry and governments could cooperate. Those priorities, he said, came before preparing for a market debut.
Altman Backs Independent Lab Oversight
The interview was published on the same day Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released an essay calling for a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development. Altman responded publicly within hours. He wrote on X that he agreed the industry needed to pace the frontier to give society time to adapt.
Altman also committed to one of the three concrete proposals in Amodei's essay. That proposal calls for independent evaluators with employee-level access to be embedded inside frontier AI labs. "Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same," Altman wrote. He added that OpenAI would share further details soon. Anthropic had already committed to adopting the measure on its own.
Amodei's essay also called for AI companies in democratic countries to eventually coordinate around shared safety standards. A third proposal would involve governments, including rivals such as China, negotiating international restrictions on the most dangerous AI capabilities. Elon Musk, whose firm xAI built Grok, also publicly backed Amodei's position. He posted on X that "Dario is right," placing three major AI figures behind the same core argument.
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Safety Pressure Reshapes OpenAI's Business Timeline
More than 1,300 employees across frontier AI companies, including senior staff at OpenAI, have backed the "Pacing the Frontier" initiative. That initiative calls for US-led mechanisms to slow AI development when necessary. The depth of internal support across competing organizations reflects how broadly safety concerns have spread beyond individual researchers.
OpenAI has been one of the most anticipated IPO candidates in the technology sector for several years. Choosing to stay private through 2026 is a significant departure from earlier expectations. Altman's framing of the delay as the responsible choice signals how much the internal conversation at these labs has shifted from competitive acceleration toward coordinated caution.
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