OpenAI will not go public in 2026, CEO Sam Altman confirmed in a Fortune interview published Saturday. The company had filed confidentially for an IPO and hired bankers and lawyers targeting the third or fourth quarter of this year, but Altman said the safety workload makes a 2026 listing ill-advised.

"We're not rushing into an IPO," Altman told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. "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.. I would say not 2026. We've got a lot of stuff to do."

reported in June that OpenAI was leaning toward 2027 due to tech-stock volatility and its own financial challenges. Altman also said it is "absolutely" possible to build an AI beyond human control and vowed to pause training if necessary to prevent that outcome. He agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to pace frontier model development, posting on X: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks."

What remains unclear

  • No new target date for the IPO was given; "when we're ready" remains the only timeline.
  • Whether Anthropic proceeds with its own IPO marketing in mid-October, as reported, is unchanged by OpenAI's delay.
  • The scope and structure of any industry agreement to slow capability improvements have not been disclosed.
  • Financial details from the confidential filing — valuation, share count, use of proceeds — remain private.

Our take

OpenAI's delay removes the nearest forcing function for public-market discipline on AI safety spending. The company can allocate capital to alignment research without quarterly scrutiny, but it also sidesteps the transparency a public filing would require. The test is whether the "lot of stuff to do" yields verifiable safety milestones before investors see a prospectus.

Sources