Altman rules out 2026 OpenAI IPO, citing AI safety

Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI will not go public next year, and he framed the reason as AI safety rather than markets. "I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public," he said in an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell, reported by TechCrunch. Asked directly about timing, Altman added: "I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do."

He tied the delay to the pace of capability itself. "Society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability," Altman said, and he defended OpenAI's unusual corporate shape in the same breath: "We have put up with this incredibly complicated structure for a long time, and this moment that we're in now is kind of why."

Bloomberg's read on the same interview was blunter, headlining that an OpenAI listing now slips to 2027.

Altman also signaled the company is weighing a slower cadence at the frontier, and Fortune notes the remarks land against a backdrop of AI safety researchers leaving frontier labs and reports of agents misbehaving on external systems. What Altman did not offer was a metric — no revenue bar, no capability threshold, no filing window — that would flip the switch from ill-advised to ready.