Topline
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ended a year of feverish Wall Street speculation Saturday in confirming the AI giant will not go public in 2026, claiming it would be “ill-advised” to move forward with an IPO amid heightened fears about artificial intelligence safety and security.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on June 2, 2025 in San Francisco, California.
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Key Facts
Altman, who earlier in the day backed a proposal by Anthropic for companies to slow down AI development while waiting for regulations and safety protocols to catch up, said OpenAI’s IPO will not happen in 2026 because the company “has a lot of stuff to do.”
In an interview with Fortune Magazine’s Alyson Shontell, Altman said OpenAI needs to be able to make decisions that are not in the interest of shareholders—including “pausing” rapid development of AI to make “more safety and alignment progress.”
Altman said OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, doesn’t feel “pressure” to go public imminently: “We’ve said it for a long time—we’ll do it when we’re ready.”
Altman said in a memo to OpenAI staff this summer that the closer the company gets to recursive self-improvement (or, AI being able to create new AI on its own), the further away an IPO would likely be because “the technology and the world may change in surprising ways, and there might be good reasons to be a private company during that time.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“I would say not 2026,” Altman said. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to do and, like meeting this moment of what’s going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments are going to work together, I’m happy to be able to do that as a private company.”
Key background
Wall Street bankers, experts and retail investors were convinced that 2026 was the year for OpenAI to have the biggest IPO in history. OpenAI took the first formal steps to transition from its non-profit governance structure into a Public Benefit Corporation in 2025 and outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, reported the company was laying the preliminary groundwork for a listing targeted for Q4 2026. OpenAI’s implied valuation pushed past $500 billion in late 2025, and Wall Street bankers began openly projecting a $1 trillion public debut. In the spring, rivals like Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO and, as SpaceX chatter dominated news cycles, pundits framed 2026 as an all-out “IPO Race“. Analysts argued OpenAI had to go public in 2026 to capture maximum liquidity before market enthusiasm cooled and platforms like Polymarket saw odds spiking to 60%+ that OpenAI would go public before the end of the year. As of Saturday, that likelihood sits at 4% on the betting site.
NEWS PEG
Anthropic and OpenAI on Saturday vowed to slow the development of its AI models and encouraged other companies to do the same. Altman backed an initial call from Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and said OpenAI, like Anthropic, will allow third-party monitoring from outside groups to ensure it’s developing its models as responsibly as possible.
TANGENT
The public discussion between AI companies comes shortly after several industry insiders issued alarming warnings about the future of the technology. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic & OpenAI researcher wrote that the developers building superintelligence tools “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and accused frontier labs of “gambling with our lives.” Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic employee, backed Coxon’s warnings and said he estimates a greater than 10% chance of human extinction from unaligned AI within the next 10 years.
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