OpenAI founder Sam Altman speaks during the G20 Innovation Ministerial on September 2, 2026, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (AFP Photo)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune published on Sept. 12 that his company would not launch its initial public offering of stock this year.
“I would say not 2026,” he said. “Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”
“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,” he said.
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.”
Altman told Fortune that he’s happy to delay OpenAI’s IPO in order to do what’s required for safety, explaining that “society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability.”
OpenAI is leaning toward holding off its initial public offering, which could value the company at $1 trillion, until next year, the New York Times reported in June, quoting people involved in the company’s deliberations as saying.
Meanwhile, OpenAI confirmed on Sept. 11 that autonomous software built on its models targeted another website during testing a couple of months before a separate attack on the coding site Hugging Face.
The AI agents targeted a site called RubyGems, a site that provides services for coding.
