Back in June, reports said OpenAI was preparing a trillion-dollar IPO. On Friday, Sam Altman himself put that timeline to rest — at least for the coming year. Asked directly in a Fortune interview whether 2027 was still realistic, he answered: 'I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do.'
The reasoning he gave was blunter than the usual corporate hedging: 'Given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.' This isn't about the company's numbers — those are fine, and ChatGPT remains the most recognized product in the AI race. The issue, Altman said, is something else: going public means answering to shareholders, and OpenAI, in his words, sometimes needs to make calls that run directly against their interests.
That's precisely why the company kept its unusual structure — a nonprofit sitting on top of a for-profit arm. While OpenAI stays private, its board can, say, delay a model release for extra safety testing without having to explain the hit to quarterly revenue to public shareholders. Altman admitted the company has discussed pausing work on its most capable systems altogether — a move that's hard to square with a public market's expectation of constant growth.
The timing lines up with a broader wave of unease across the industry. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei recently called for the AI race to slow down, and one of his own researchers quit publicly, criticizing how both companies handle risk. Altman openly agreed with Amodei — an unusual moment of alignment between two rivals fighting hard for the same market, both admitting the pace of development has outrun their ability to manage it.
For the market, this means at least another year without one of the most anticipated listings in tech history. For rivals like Anthropic, which also filed IPO paperwork this summer, Altman's comments ease some competitive pressure to rush their own listing. And for lawmakers pushing harder for AI rules, the OpenAI chief's words read less like an attempt to dodge oversight and more like an argument for it.
