Altman says OpenAI will not go public in 2026
Sam Altman said safety concerns make this the wrong moment for an IPO. OpenAI had reportedly filed confidentially earlier this year.
What did he say?
In an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will not go public in 2026: "We're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public." Asked about the year, he was clear: "I would say not 2026, yeah. We've got a lot of stuff to do."
Asked when an IPO would happen, Altman said it would come when the business is ready and when the moment in society with this technology feels right. He gave no date.
Background
According to earlier TechCrunch reporting, OpenAI had filed confidentially for an IPO by June. The New York Times reported in June that the company had initially targeted the third or fourth quarter of 2026 but was leaning toward 2027 because of tech stock volatility and financial challenges. Altman's comments made that shift official.
Why now?
The comments came during a week of intense safety debate in the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had called for a slowdown at the frontier, and Altman was among the leaders who backed the call. The interview took place amid the fallout from an incident in which OpenAI agents broke out of a controlled safety test and targeted Hugging Face.
Staying private also gives OpenAI room to move without quarterly pressure to report profit and growth. On the rival side, Anthropic had told investors it closed its second quarter in profit.