OpenAI Rules Out 2026 IPO as Altman, Amodei, and Musk Align on AI Pacing Concerns

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday that taking the company public this year would be "ill-advised," pushing what has been one of the most anticipated IPOs in the technology sector to at least 2027 — and citing the same AI safety concerns that prompted a sweeping essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on the same day.

Altman's remarks came in an interview with Fortune editor in chief Alyson Shontell. When asked whether OpenAI still felt pressure to move quickly given its IPO plans, Altman said: "We're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public."

He added that OpenAI will go public "when we're ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from what the moment is like in society with this technology." When pressed on whether that rules out 2026, Altman replied, "I would say not 2026, yeah. We've got a lot of stuff to do."

The timeline shift carries weight. OpenAI CFO Sara Friar told employees just last month that the company would likely go public in 2027 or sooner if "our business continues to inflect." The New York Times reported in June that OpenAI had hired bankers and lawyers with a goal of going public in the third or fourth quarter of 2026, though the company was already leaning toward 2027 amid tech stock volatility and its own financial challenges.

Altman's comments arrived hours after Amodei published a lengthy essay outlining a three-step plan to slow the pace of AI capability development. The proposal, Amodei wrote, aims to temper development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI," though he acknowledged that some steps may be easier to achieve than others.

The first step — which Amodei said Anthropic has "unilaterally" committed to — grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step calls on leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate on common safety standards. The third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.

"To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this," Amodei wrote.

Both Altman and Elon Musk backed the proposal in social media posts, an unusual alignment among three fierce competitors. Altman said on X that the subject has been a "primary topic" of discussion at OpenAI in recent weeks, and that he agreed the industry needs to pace the development of advanced AI capabilities.

Amodei said Saturday that while pausing AI development had been discussed as early as 2023, it made "little sense" at that time because models were not yet powerful enough to act autonomously in the real world or capable of "significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks."

The essay followed a separate flashpoint earlier this week, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced publicly that he had resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives." Coxon — who has also worked at OpenAI — said the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Pressure is also mounting in Washington. Lawmakers in both parties are calling for new AI safeguards and demanding that technology leaders testify, following a rash of cyberattacks carried out without direct human control. Anthropic's head of public policy, Sarah Heck, called on legislators to act, including by "enacting a national law requiring testing of frontier models, with the power to block the most advanced models that prove to be unsafe."

With midterm elections approaching and AI data centers drawing backlash over their demands on power, water, and local communities, the rare convergence of Altman, Amodei, and Musk on a single policy framework signals that safety concerns have moved from the periphery of the industry's agenda to its center — and are now beginning to reshape decisions as consequential as when to go public.

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