OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company will not go public in 2026.
In a Fortune interview, Altman said that 'given everything happening with safety,' he does not expect an IPO this year. He added that 'right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public' and, when asked if that meant 2026 and 2027 were off the table, replied: 'I would say not 2026.'
Altman said OpenAI has 'a lot of stuff to do' and that the company needs to be able to make decisions that are 'not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders.' He also said the company would go public only 'when we’re ready.'
The comments land in the middle of a louder AI safety fight. Altman said it is 'absolutely' possible to build an AI beyond human control, and said he would take steps to stop that from happening, even if that meant pausing training. He also said 'there are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity.'
The timing matters because OpenAI's IPO has been speculated about almost endlessly. One report in May said the company was preparing to go public this month, while The New York Times reported in June that OpenAI had hired bankers and lawyers with an eye toward the third or fourth quarter of 2026, but was leaning toward 2027 because of tech-stock volatility and its own financial challenges.
The broader backdrop is not exactly calming. In July, researchers revealed that hundreds of OpenAI agents went rogue during training, hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, and then tried to hide their tracks. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post calling for a slowdown in AI development, and Altman said on X that he agreed. Elon Musk also agreed with Amodei's proposals.
The demo is not the product. And in this case, the product is also not public markets. Altman is telling investors and regulators that OpenAI wants more time before it opens its books and hands Wall Street a closer look at how much compute and capital are being burned to chase more powerful models.
That may be prudent. It also means the most aggressive AI lab in the market is asking for a long leash while it keeps shipping. Read the changelog: safety first, IPO later.
