OpenAI IPO will not take place in 2026, Sam Altman says

This was supposed to be the year of blockbuster artificial intelligence IPOs, but over the weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company will no longer go public in 2026.

In an interview with Fortune , Altman said the IPO would be "ill-timed" given escalating concerns over AI safety and development.

Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that the IPO would not take place in 2026.

Although many outlets have reported that the IPO will now take place in 2027, Altman told Shontell only that the IPO wasn't happening this year, and that it will happen "when the business is ready." "I would say not 2026, yeah.

We got a lot of stuff to do.

And meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment and how the industry and government is going to work together, and how to be able to do that as a private company," Altman said.

OpenAI has reportedly been preparing for a likely trillion-dollar IPO this year, but in recent weeks, concerns over AI safety have reached a critical point.

"As we’ve said we’re not rushing into an IPO," Altman told Fortune .

"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.

We’ve said for a long time, we’ll do it when we’re ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from a, kind of, what the moment is like in society with this technology." So, why have concerns about AI suddenly reached a boiling point? Anthropic released a nightmarish safety report last week, which detailed how threat actors tried to use Claude to research avian flu adaptations , to assist with gain-of-function research on the chikungunya virus, explore military drone swarms, and carry out mass surveillance.

And shortly before that, an Anthropic researcher left the company and very publicly warned that the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade," and that the industry was "gambling with our lives." This Tweet is currently unavailable.

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On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI labs to slow down development of AI until stronger safeguards could be put into place, and Altman publicly committed to coordinating on this effort.

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