OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said that his firm will not pursue an independent public offering (IPO) in 2026, amid growing concerns over the safety risks posed by autonomous AI models.
OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1 form to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, the first step towards an IPO that could value the firm at more than $1 trillion. But in an interview with Fortune over the weekend, Altman said that now would be an “ill-advised moment” to pursue an IPO.
In recent months, experts in the sector have raised serious concerns over the potential risks of advanced AI development. Incidents such as the attack on the AI platform Hugging Face by a group of OpenAI agents, have led AI developers to reexamine their approaches to deploying autonomous AI systems.
Amid these fears, Altman said OpenAI’s IPO would now likely happen in 2027, and suggested OpenAI will slow its model development.
“We do want to continue to make better models and products and we do believe in iterative deployment, and I think we have been right that society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability, but that is different from saying we will just barrel full steam ahead,” Altman said, adding that OpenAI would pursue safety over profits for the time being.
“We need to be able to make decisions that are not obviously in the interest of our business and our shareholders, for the responsibility of fulfilling our mission and what that’s going to require,” he said.
Altman’s comments echo those of his industry peers. Jacob Coxon, a former safety researcher at Anthropic, made headlines last week when he linked his resignation to allegations that the firm and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” by pursuing self-improving superintelligent AI systems.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has called for slower AI development over fears that swarms of AI agents could cause “catastrophic damage” or even take over the entire public internet.
Anthropic has committed to providing independent evaluators with full access to its internal systems to oversee safe AI development. Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of xAI, has echoed this call.
AI firms are not the only voices sounding alarm in the sector. In June, cyber security agencies from across the Five Eyes intelligence alliance warned that advanced AI attacks may be just months away.
