Sam Altman says this is an 'ill-advised' time to IPO, given safety concerns

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in light of recent safety incidents, he may not take his company public this year.

Matt RAMEY / AFP via Getty Images Sam Altman said OpenAI won't go public in 2026 amid mounting AI safety concerns.

Altman said an IPO now would make it harder to prioritize safety over shareholders.

OpenAI had been preparing for a possible September IPO.

Sam Altman says now is not a good time.

In a Fortune interview that aired on Saturday, OpenAI's CEO said that "given everything that's happening with safety," he doesn't expect to take his company public this year.

"Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public," he said.

When Fortune's editor in chief, Alyson Shontell, asked if that meant Altman wouldn't take OpenAI public in 2026 and 2027, Altman replied, "I would say not 2026." "We got a lot of stuff to do," he added.

"We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders." The date of OpenAI's initial public offering, which is likely to be a trillion-dollar affair, has been speculated about almost endlessly.

In May, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider that the company was preparing to go public this month.

That doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

Altman's comments about "safety" come as the industry debates whether an AI model could go off the rails and harm humanity.

In July, researchers revealed that hundreds of OpenAI agents went rogue during training, hacked into Hugging Face's servers, and then hid their tracks.

Altman's chief rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei , on Saturday published a blog post calling for a slowdown in AI development, to which Altman replied on X that he agreed.