OpenAI will not go public in 2026, with chief executive Sam Altman pointing to safety concerns over rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, according to a Fortune interview published Saturday.
“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,” Altman told Fortune. Asked whether the company might target 2027 instead, he said: “I would say not 2026.”
Altman said the company had “a lot of stuff to do” to meet requirements for safety and alignment, and to work out how industry and governments can cooperate on the issue.
The New York Times reported in June that the San Francisco-based OpenAI was considering whether to delay a potentially trillion-dollar listing until the following year.
The decision follows warnings from two researchers at rival Anthropic about rapidly progressing AI risks. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the United States have called for new rules to govern AI systems.
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei on Saturday urged AI companies to move more deliberately. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in an essay shared on social media. Altman responded on the X platform that he agreed, writing that pacing the frontier had been a primary topic of discussions at OpenAI in recent weeks.