OpenAI has shelved any prospects of launching an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026. CEO Sam Altman made the disclosure even as his top competitor, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, issued a public appeal urging frontier technology developers to ease their developmental pace. Speaking in an interview with Fortune broadcast on Saturday (September 12), Altman noted that ongoing debates regarding safety risks make a market debut unwise right now.As we have said, we’re not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, this would be right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that. We’ve said for a long time we’ll do it when we’re ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from a kind of what the moment is like in society with this technology.When asked directly by Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell whether this rule ruled out a public float across both 2026 and 2027, Altman clarified that he was explicitly ruling out 2026. He also explained that the organisation has significant unfinished work.I would say not 2026. Yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do, and like 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. We do want to continue to make better models and products, and we do believe in iterative deployment. And I think we have been right that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability, but that is different from saying we will just barrel full steam ahead. We’ve talked in the last couple of months about pausing runs as we get to these new level of capabilities to make more safety and alignment progress. We will do more of that going forward. We have talked about the need for the industry to come together, and ideally, international governments to come together. I think that is also important.
Safety incidents cloud trillion-dollar market speculation
Wall Street analysts had spent months projecting the timing of an OpenAI public debut, with expectations pointing toward a record trillion-dollar valuation. While an insider speaking to Business Insider in May claimed the firm had been laying the groundwork to list as soon as this month, ongoing security fallout has complicated that trajectory.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.Taking to social media platform X, Altman openly endorsed this core message:I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.The push for a cooling-off period also won backing from xAI leader Elon Musk, who endorsed Amodei’s regulatory concepts.
