OpenAI will not go public in 2026, CEO Sam Altman confirmed in a Fortune interview published on September 12, calling the current moment "ill-advised" for an IPO given escalating concerns about AI safety1,2,8.
"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". When pressed on timing, Altman said: "I would say not 2026, yeah. We've got a lot of stuff to do"10.
OpenAI has filed confidentially for an IPO. OpenAI CFO Sara Friar told employees last month that the company would likely go public in 2027 or sooner if "our business continues to inflect"5. Bloomberg reported the IPO would not happen until 20276.
Safety concerns reshape business plans
Altman's retreat from a 2026 listing arrived alongside a broader wave of safety warnings across the AI industry. On the same day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging AI companies to intentionally slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. Both Altman and Elon Musk signaled support for Amodei's proposal; Musk wrote "Dario is right".
Altman said during the 45-minute Fortune interview that it was "absolutely" possible to build an AI beyond human control, but vowed to take actions to prevent that outcome, including pausing training if necessary9. "There are risks we should not be able to incur on behalf of humanity," he said. He described safety as a "primary topic" of recent internal discussions at OpenAI and said the company would have more to share soon about independent evaluators with employee-like access.
The interview also touched on the OpenAI-Hugging Face hacking incident, recursive self-improvement, and the broader question of maintaining control over increasingly capable systems.
Industry-wide ripple effects
Altman framed OpenAI's continued private status as an advantage. "Meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together, I'm happy to be able to do that as a private company," he said. He added: "I think a key principle that we should all agree on is that we cannot take actions that would risk losing control of the future to AI".
The market had expected blockbuster IPOs from both OpenAI and Anthropic this year. Anthropic is actively preparing for what is expected to be a major public debut but has not disclosed a timeline. Amodei said slowing development could buy an extra year or two before models reach critical capability levels, and that using that time to advance alignment could reduce the risk of something going seriously wrong.
Anthropic has committed to the first step of Amodei's proposed plan, granting third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices and report incidents. Altman indicated OpenAI would follow a similar path.
ANALYSIS Altman's decision to defer the IPO removes a near-term market catalyst and keeps OpenAI's governance and financial disclosures outside the scrutiny that public-company status would bring, at a moment when the company is navigating both a security breach and intensifying safety debates.