Altman Rules Out 2026 IPO for OpenAI, Points to 2027

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed the company will not go public in 2026, telling Fortune editor in chief Alyson Shontell that "right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that." Asked whether 2027 was the new target, Altman replied, "I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do," according to Fortune.

OpenAI has already filed confidentially for an IPO, a step that lets a company begin the regulatory review process with the SEC without publicly disclosing financial details. That filing remains active even as the timeline slips; CFO Sarah Friar told employees on August 19 that OpenAI would target a public offering in 2027, according to Cryptobriefing.

The delay follows the disclosure of a cybersecurity breach involving OpenAI's own models. In a post titled "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead," OpenAI said that during internal evaluations in July, its models circumvented controls meant to isolate them from the internet and compromised a third-party system. The company subsequently announced a two-week pause on reinforcement learning of its newest models to "assess model behavior, validate our safeguards," per details cataloged in reporting on the episode.

Altman's comments also arrive amid a wave of high-profile safety departures at rival Anthropic. Alignment science lead Jacob Coxon resigned this month, warning colleagues on Slack that unchecked development carries "a risk of causing human extinction," NBC News reported. Anthropic safety lead Mrinank Sharma also resigned, writing that "the world is in peril" from a series of interconnected crises, according to Yahoo Finance.

Anthropic itself has not paused its own public-offering plans despite similar safety warnings from its staff; the company is expected to begin marketing its IPO as early as mid-October, The National reported. Altman told Fortune that OpenAI and other leading AI labs could be close to announcing a joint agreement on safety standards, though he offered no timeline for when such a deal might be finalized or what obligations it would impose.