Altman Says OpenAI Won’t IPO This Year

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just admitted that the company’s long-awaited, potentially record-setting IPO won’t be happening this year. Instead of rumored financial woes, Altman is blaming AI safety concerns for the timeline shift.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, this would right now be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman said in an interview with Fortune published over the weekend.

OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO earlier this summer, just days after competitor Anthropic it them to the punch. Although the company never shared a timeline on when the IPO would officially hit the market, for months now various media reports had been pencilling it in for this year, despite alleged disagreements between company executives on OpenAI’s financial readiness for an IPO.

But now, Altman is saying not to expect the market debut until at least next year. That’s because there is “a lot of stuff to do” on the safety and alignment side of AI, Altman said, all of which he’d rather tackle as a private company.

Artificial intelligence development has long been controversial, but over the past year the leading AI companies have faced increased public scrutiny over the safety of their models, especially with the recent introduction of models that the AI giants themselves deem potential cyber safety hazards. Those fears began with Anthropic’s Mythos model back in March and then crescendoed in July when OpenAI agents went rogue and hacked Hugging Face.