Wall Street will have to wait for one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed it will not happen in 2026.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune on Friday, he pointed out that the company has long maintained it’s not in a hurry to rush ahead with an IPO.
“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,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.
He added that OpenAI will go public when the business is ready and when the company is ready as it relates to “what the moment is like in society with this technology.”
When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, “I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”
In June, the New York Times reported that OpenAI was leaning toward pushing back its IPO, which that could value it at $1 trillion, from this year to next year. A top consideration at the time was the SpaceX IPO that raised $85 billion Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company. Shares jumped at first, sending its valuation to $1.8 trillion—then quickly tumbled.
Global markets were also choppy back then and continue to be now as the Iran war has re-escalated in recent months, spiking oil prices again and elevating inflation forecasts.
Altman’s comments about OpenAI’s IPO come amid growing concerns about the safety of AI following a string of alarming incidents in which swarms of rogue AI agents have hacked websites like Hugging Face, and surreptitiously communicated with each other on online message boards and disused wiki pages.
On Tuesday, a researcher at Anthropic publicly announced his resignation, and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI (where he also previously worked) of acting irresponsibly in developing ever more capable AI systems.
Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced Saturday that his company is committing to a new safety measure—giving independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company—as part of a broader plan he says is needed to slow the pace of AI development.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote in a blog post.
For his part, Altman also suggested OpenAI and other leading AI companies may be close to announcing a pact to slow AI development and collectively address the rapidly increasing safety risks.
In a meeting with OpenAI employees earlier this week, he said the company was considering tapping the brakes on its most cutting edge AI, according to Bloomberg.
On Friday, Altman told Fortune that he’s happy to delay OpenAI’s IPO in order to do what’s required for safety, explaining that “society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability.”
He also said the company has discussed pauses as it gets to new levels of capabilities to allow for additional progress on safety and alignment. The AI industry overall and ideally foreign governments should come together on the issue as well, Altman argued.
“We have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time, and this moment that we’re in now is kind of why,” he said, alluding to its corporate governance that’s split between non-profit and for-profit entities. “We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that’s going to require.”