OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has ruled out an IPO for his company this year in an interview with the business magazine Fortune, citing the current safety debate in the industry. A listing would come at an extremely unfavorable time given the discussions around AI risks, he said in the interview. OpenAI had already submitted confidential IPO documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026.
Altman points to industry safety debate
The interview was conducted by Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell on Friday with Altman. She asked whether OpenAI felt pressured by its own IPO plans to move quickly – especially in light of the fallout from the security incident at Hugging Face, which OpenAI says it was involved in. That same day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay calling for the industry to deliberately slow its pace of development; Altman had publicly agreed with that call within hours. Altman replied that an IPO would come at an extremely unfavorable time given the ongoing safety discussions in the industry. When directly asked about the year 2026, he confirmed: not this year. The company still has a lot to do, he said, such as addressing safety and alignment issues as well as collaboration between industry and governments. OpenAI had dissolved its internal Preparedness team for disaster risks in August, which had further fueled the debate about the company’s safety resources. In the same conversation, Altman also addressed fears of AI development spiraling out of control and said OpenAI takes these worries seriously. He said he would be glad to work through such questions while still a private company, without the added pressure of a public listing.
CFO names 2027 as new target date
OpenAI submitted confidential IPO documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2026, as the company announced itself, and expected the step to become publicly known regardless. At that time, the last known private valuation stood at around $850 billion; the company gave no more recent figure at the time of the interview – that figure is not independently verified. CFO Sarah Friar told employees in an internal presentation in August that OpenAI would go public in 2027, sooner if growth kept accelerating. She described the IPO as one milestone among several funding rounds, not a finish line. According to Friar, the revenue run rate had climbed 35 percent quarter to date, enterprise revenue even 50 percent, and the company’s in-house coding and work product had around twenty million weekly active users. Competitor Anthropic has also postponed its own IPO, originally slated for early October – though for organizational reasons around its prospectus, not over fundamental safety concerns like OpenAI’s.
What will matter is whether Altman’s safety argument still holds once competitive pressure builds from Anthropic’s listing, planned for mid-October 2026. So far, OpenAI is deliberately not committing to a timeline of its own, while its rival moves ahead with a firm date. Whether that restraint turns out to be a strategic advantage or a missed window will only become clear once market conditions for AI IPOs shift again.
