Sam Altman Rules Out OpenAI IPO in 2026, Citing AI Safety Emergency

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will not go public in 2026, telling Fortune Magazine in an exclusive interview that doing so would be "ill-advised" given escalating concerns about AI safety. Altman said the company "has a lot of stuff to do" in meeting safety and alignment demands, pushing any potential listing to at least 2027. Polymarket odds of an OpenAI IPO before year-end collapsed to 4% following the announcement, down from more than 60% earlier in the year.

The remarks came amid a broader moment of reckoning across the AI industry. Altman had told OpenAI employees earlier in the week that the company was open to slowing development of its most advanced AI systems and hoped peer labs would do the same. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki separately called on companies to coordinate on slowing future development until shared safety standards are in place.

Anthropist CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday calling for a slowdown in the AI race, a position quickly echoed by both Altman and Elon Musk. Amodei also announced that Anthropic would give independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company as a new safety commitment. The statements from the three most prominent figures in AI landed against the backdrop of a public firestorm triggered earlier in the week when an Anthropic researcher announced on social media that he had quit the company. Altman and Amodei are both scheduled to speak at Salesforce Dreamforce in San Francisco next week, where the IPO delay and safety coordination are likely to be central topics.