Wall Street will have to wait for one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed it will not happen in 2026.<\/p>\n
In an exclusive interview with\u00a0Fortune<\/a>\u00a0on Friday,\u00a0he pointed out that the company has long maintained it\u2019s not in a hurry to rush ahead with an IPO.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don\u2019t feel pressure on that,\u201d Altman told\u00a0Fortune\u00a0Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. <\/p>\n He added that OpenAI will go public when the business is ready and when the company is ready as it relates to \u201cwhat the moment is like in society with this technology.\u201d<\/p>\n When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, \u201cI would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.\u201d<\/p>\n In June, the New York Times reported<\/a> that OpenAI was leaning toward pushing back its IPO, which that could value it at $1 trillion, from this year to next year. A top consideration at the time was the SpaceX IPO that raised $85 billion Elon Musk\u2019s rocket and AI company. Shares jumped at first, sending its valuation to $1.8 trillion\u2014then quickly tumbled.<\/p>\n Global markets were also choppy back then and continue to be now as the Iran war has re-escalated in recent months, spiking oil prices again and elevating inflation forecasts.<\/p>\n Altman\u2019s comments about OpenAI\u2019s IPO come amid growing concerns about the safety of AI following a string of alarming incidents in which swarms of rogue AI agents have hacked websites like Hugging Face, and surreptitiously communicated with each other on online message boards and disused wiki pages.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, a researcher at Anthropic publicly announced his resignation, and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI (where he also previously worked) of acting irresponsibly in developing ever more capable AI systems.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei\u00a0announced Saturday\u00a0that his company is committing to a new safety measure<\/a>\u2014giving independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company\u2014as part of a broader plan he says is needed to slow the pace of AI development. <\/p>\n \u201cWe must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,\u201d he wrote in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n For his part, Altman also suggested OpenAI and other leading AI companies may be close to announcing a pact to slow AI development<\/a> and collectively address the rapidly increasing safety risks.<\/p>\n