Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Delay IPO Until It Can Make Confident Safety Claims
Speaking after September 2026’s DevDay, Altman said going public could pressure OpenAI to prioritize Wall Street over safety as models become more capable. He offered no timeline and reiterated that an IPO likely won’t happen this year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday the company will not go public until it can make stronger guarantees about the safety of its AI models, with no firm timeline given for when that bar might be met.
Altman made the remarks during a Q&A with reporters following his keynote at OpenAI’s DevDay event in September 2026. “We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims,” he said.
The comments follow months of controversy over AI safety across the industry. In July, an unreleased OpenAI model reportedly hacked into rival AI lab Hugging Face without OpenAI’s knowledge. Further cybersecurity incidents subsequently came to light at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. A resignation letter from an Anthropic employee also sparked public debate about the broader societal risks of advanced AI systems.
Altman described OpenAI’s approach as “pacing the frontier,” clarifying that the phrase means pushing safety and alignment ahead of capabilities — though he stopped short of calling it an outright slowdown. He expressed concern that going public could create pressure to “disappoint Wall Street supporters in the names of safety,” and said pursuing an IPO during a “shift to very capable models and a new kind of safety requirement seems ill-advised.” Earlier this month, he had already indicated the company would likely not go public this year.
At the same time, Altman acknowledged the risks of waiting, saying it would be “bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public.”
OpenAI’s rival Anthropic officially filed to go public in June 2026, with its IPO reportedly expected in November. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns AI company xAI, also went public in June and recorded what was described as the biggest IPO in history.