Hajra Naz
OpenAI has already taken a step toward going public. The company filed confidentially for an IPO back in June, following a similar move by Anthropic. But CEO Sam Altman says that milestone won’t happen this year.
Altman sat down for an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. The conversation took place against a tense backdrop. It came shortly after OpenAI dealt with the fallout from a hack tied to Hugging Face. It also followed wider industry debate over AI safety standards. Shontell asked Altman whether the pressure to move quickly still applies, given the company’s IPO ambitions.
Altman pushed back on that idea. He said OpenAI isn’t racing toward a public offering. Given the current climate around safety, he argued, now would actually be a poor time to list the company on the stock market.
He explained that OpenAI will only go public once conditions line up. That means waiting until the business itself is ready. It also means waiting until society feels prepared for what this technology represents. When asked directly whether this rules out an IPO in 2026, Altman confirmed it does. He said the company still has a lot of work ahead of it.
Read More: OpenAI’s New Board Member Has Long Warned About AI Risks
This isn’t the first sign that OpenAI was reconsidering its timeline. Back in June, the New York Times reported that the company had already brought on bankers and lawyers. Their original target was to go public sometime in the third or fourth quarter of 2026.
But according to that report, OpenAI was starting to favor pushing things to 2027 instead. Two factors were driving that shift: unpredictable swings in tech stock valuations and financial pressures within the company itself.
