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

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. “We need to pace the frontier,” he said.

Anthropic is also eyeing an IPO in the near future.

SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk also agreed with Amodei’s proposals, which included stationing third-party monitors inside the big AI labs.

In filing for an IPO, OpenAI would open its books, giving the public a clearer view of the vast resources it is spending toward the goal of building even more powerful AI models.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent Saturday.