This was supposed to be the year of blockbuster artificial intelligence IPOs, but over the weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company will no longer go public in 2026.
In an interview with Fortune, Altman said the IPO would be “ill-timed” given escalating concerns over AI safety and development. Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that the IPO would not take place in 2026. Although many outlets have reported that the IPO will now take place in 2027, Altman told Shontell only that the IPO wasn’t happening this year, and that it will happen “when the business is ready.”
“I would say not 2026, yeah. We got a lot of stuff to do. And meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment and how the industry and government is going to work together, and how to be able to do that as a private company,” Altman said.
OpenAI has reportedly been preparing for a likely trillion-dollar IPO this year, but in recent weeks, concerns over AI safety have reached a critical point.
“As we’ve said we’re not rushing into an IPO,” Altman told Fortune. “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. 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.”
So, why have concerns about AI suddenly reached a boiling point?
Anthropic released a nightmarish safety report last week, which detailed how threat actors tried to use Claude to research avian flu adaptations, to assist with gain-of-function research on the chikungunya virus, explore military drone swarms, and carry out mass surveillance. And shortly before that, an Anthropic researcher left the company and very publicly warned that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and that the industry was “gambling with our lives.”
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On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for AI labs to slow down development of AI until stronger safeguards could be put into place, and Altman publicly committed to coordinating on this effort.
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Altman’s comments about the OpenAI IPO come amid these growing concerns.
“This has clearly been a week where a lot more people are grappling with the issues in front of us,” Altman told Fortune. “So, I’m actually mostly grateful that this is happening. This is a conversation the world is overdue for, and we are clearly entering a realm of extremely capable models, and a high-stakes need to get things right.”
Altman’s video interview with Fortune provides some insight into Altman’s thinking at a turning point for the industry.
As the most visible and well-known AI company, the performance of OpenAI’s IPO will be seen as a barometer for the health of the industry as a whole. Because as fears over AI safety rise, so have fears of the AI bubble bursting.
Earlier this year, SpaceX (which recently merged with xAI) launched its IPO, and Anthropic previously filed paperwork for its own planned IPO. Altman’s comments are consistent with a June report from the New York Times, which stated the company was leaning toward delaying its IPO until 2027.
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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
