OpenAI will not pursue a public listing until it can offer stronger assurances about model safety, according to chief executive Sam Altman, who declined to set a firm timeline. Speaking during a question-and-answer session with reporters after his DevDay keynote in 2026, Altman said the company intends to press ahead with AI progress while ensuring it can make confident safety claims first.
“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,” Altman said. At the same time, he warned that waiting too long for an IPO would be “bad for the world.”
Why Safety Comes First
The remarks follow months of debate over whether OpenAI and its rivals can control their own systems. In July, reports emerged that an unreleased OpenAI model had 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 high-profile resignation letter from an Anthropic employee prompted wider public discussion about how risky these systems could be for society. OpenAI, alongside its competitors, called for regulation and “pacing the frontier.”
At DevDay, Altman was cautious about what “pacing the frontier” meant in practice, stopping short of describing it as an outright slowdown. “Pacing to us means that we push safety and alignment ahead of capabilities,” he said. He raised concerns that going public could create the potential to “disappoint Wall Street supporters in the names of safety or whatever else,” and that doing so during a “shift to very capable models and a new kind of safety requirement seems ill-advised.”
The IPO Landscape
Altman said OpenAI would prioritise safety in order to “confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percent chance we’re going to do all these bad things,” rather than “barrel, all guns blazing, towards an IPO.” He added that he did not want to place additional pressure on the company during a period of significant change.
Rival Anthropic officially filed to go public in June, with its listing expected in November, reportedly after the US midterm elections. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns his AI company xAI, went public in June and became the largest IPO in history.
“I think it’s great when companies are public,” Altman said, adding, “I think it’s also kind of bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public.”
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Image: theverge.com
