OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company will not go public in 2026, telling Fortune in an interview published September 12 that an offering now would land at the wrong time for a company still working through AI safety and alignment problems.
"I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public," Altman said, adding that OpenAI feels no pressure to move. Asked directly whether that ruled out this year, he answered, "I would say not 2026, yeah. We've got a lot of stuff to do," as TechCrunch reported.
The filing already exists
The delay is a timing decision, not a reversal. OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 8, one week after Anthropic made the same move, so the registration statement that precedes a listing is already in hand. The company said at the time that it had not decided on timing — "it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company" — and named no valuation target, share count or date.
OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion post-money. Altman did not rule out a later offering.
Altman raised the possibility of slowing model releases
In the same interview, Altman told Fortune that OpenAI has discussed pausing development as it reaches new levels of capability, to allow more progress on safety and give society time to adapt at each stage. He also said he is willing to delay the IPO in order to do what that work requires.
Anthropic is on the same track
OpenAI is not the only frontier lab holding a confidential filing. Anthropic filed a week earlier, on June 1, and Uristocrat reported in August that Anthropic expects its IPO to match or exceed SpaceX's $75 billion record raise. Both companies are weighing public-market timing against capital commitments already made in private. Among them is the $250 billion Nvidia was in talks to guarantee for OpenAI's Ohio data center, a commitment struck while the company was still private.
Source: Fortune
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