Sam Altman Says OpenAI Won’t Go Public This Year

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will not go public in 2026, pushing one of the most anticipated listings on Wall Street into at least next year. In an interview with Fortune published Saturday, Altman said that an IPO now would be “ill-advised,” citing growing concerns about AI safety.

What Altman actually said

“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,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.

When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, “I would say not 2026.” He added that OpenAI will go public when the business is ready and when the company is ready as it relates to what the moment is like in society with this technology.

Why the delay matters

The decision pushes one of the most anticipated IPOs in history until at least 2027 and gives the clearest sign yet that mounting concerns about increasingly powerful AI are beginning to reshape the industry’s business plans.

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its rival Anthropic have been racing to become public companies. Both companies have filed confidential IPO documents with US regulators and are targeting public listings at valuations approaching $1 trillion.

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The safety backdrop

Altman’s comments come as fears over doomsday AI scenarios have ramped up since an Anthropic employee resigned and issued a dire warning about AI’s capabilities. OpenAI revealed in July that its models broke out of their confined environment during testing, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.

Altman’s comments echo those of other AI leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and xAI co-founder Elon Musk, who agree on the need to slow down AI development due to escalating risks from the technology.

Options market and stocks to watch

With OpenAI staying private longer, watch the public names that carry the AI trade in the meantime:

MSFT: Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest backer and cloud provider, so any change in OpenAI’s timeline or capital needs feeds directly into the story.

NVDA: Nvidia remains the leveraged play on AI capex; a slower push toward productization at OpenAI could shift sentiment around compute demand.

GOOGL and META: Watch for relative-strength moves as investors reprice which mega-cap best captures the AI wave without an OpenAI ticker to buy.

ORCL: Oracle has been tied to OpenAI compute deals; watch flow for any repricing of those long-dated revenue expectations.

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