OpenAI Rules Out a 2026 IPO, Altman Says AI Risk 'Cannot Be Tolerated'
OpenAI will not sell shares to the public in 2026, its chief executive Sam Altman has said, citing safety concerns around artificial intelligence that he argued make even a small chance of catastrophic harm unacceptable.
In remarks published on Saturday (September 12, 2026) by the business magazine Fortune, Mr. Altman said the company does not feel under pressure to list. "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that," he said. Asked whether an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026 was off the table in favour of 2027, he replied: "I would say not 2026."
An IPO is the process by which a privately held company sells shares to the public for the first time, allowing investors to trade in its stock.
Mr. Altman said the company had other priorities. "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," he said.
The comments come amid growing pressure on AI companies. Lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States have called for new rules to govern AI systems, following warnings from researchers and reports of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems. Some AI safety researchers have also left their companies over concerns about the risks of the technology.
Asked about an estimate that there could be a 10% chance of AI-driven human extinction by the end of the decade, Mr. Altman said he did not know how such a figure could be arrived at. He nevertheless said the risk was serious enough that companies and governments should behave as though it could not be tolerated.
"Whether it's 10 or eight or six, the point is, we all have a tremendous amount of responsibility, and cannot let egos or incentives for profit or anything else get in the way," he said. "We need to act such that we are not taking any of those numbers of risk, and I believe we can."
Fortune also reported that Mr. Altman suggested OpenAI and other leading AI firms may be close to announcing a pact to slow development and cooperate on safety risks.
On the same day, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei urged AI companies to take a more deliberate approach. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Mr. Amodei wrote in an essay on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Altman later posted that he agreed. "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," he wrote. "This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks."
Those safety concerns have not slowed Anthropic's own IPO plans. People familiar with the matter told Reuters this month that the company is expected to begin marketing its offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the U.S. midterm elections in November.
In June, The New York Times reported that San Francisco-based OpenAI was weighing whether to hold off until 2027 on a listing that could be worth about a trillion dollars (roughly ₹88 lakh crore at current exchange rates). At that time, shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX were falling after a surge that had pushed that company's valuation to $1.8 trillion.
Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has publicly confirmed the timing of any listing or of a joint safety agreement. The statements reported so far are the personal remarks of their chief executives and, in the case of Anthropic's listing, come from unnamed sources. Readers should treat the details as provisional until the companies make formal announcements.
