Sam Altman says OpenAI won't go public this year

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The OpenAI chief executive said an IPO in 2026 would be "ill-advised" given growing AI safety concerns

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Sam Altman said in a new interview that OpenAI will not hold an initial public offering in 2026, saying the current environment makes it the wrong time to go public. "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 in the interview published Saturday.

When asked whether an IPO would shift to 2027, Altman did not commit to a timeline but was direct about the current year. "I would say not 2026," he said, adding that the company has significant work ahead on safety and alignment and on how governments and industry can work together.

Altman said OpenAI has discussed pausing development as it reaches new levels of AI capability to allow additional progress on safety. He also indicated that OpenAI and its peers in the AI industry may be nearing a formal commitment to jointly tackle the escalating safety risks. "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," he said, referring to the company's split between non-profit and for-profit entities. "We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that's going to require."

Altman's remarks come against a backdrop of mounting concern within the AI industry. Earlier this week, Altman told OpenAI employees that the company was open to slowing the development of its most advanced AI and hoped peer labs would do the same, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has also called on companies in the field to coordinate on slowing future development until shared safety standards are in place.

The warnings follow a series of security incidents involving AI agents. A swarm of OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face, a platform for open-source AI development, leading OpenAI to slow model development and add new security controls. Researcher Jacob Coxon, who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned earlier this week and publicly accused the companies of "gambling with our lives," a post that drew more than 150 million views on X $TWTR.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies and governments to slow the pace of AI capabilities development, announcing that Anthropic would give outside evaluators standing access to its internal systems at the same level granted to employees. Amodei said a more capable version of the kind of AI agent swarm involved in recent incidents could, within six to 12 months, be able to take over the internet with a persistent botnet.

Altman said OpenAI will pursue a public offering once the business is ready and the company has a clear sense of "what the moment is like in society with this technology."

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