Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI listing in 2026 and gives safety as the reason
Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI listing in 2026 and gives safety as the reason
摘要: OpenAI
Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI listing in 2026 and gives safety as the reason
September 13, 2026 - 3:54 pm
Credit: Meir Chaimowitz via Shutt
正文
Sam Altman rules out an OpenAI listing in 2026 and gives safety as the reason
September 13, 2026 - 3:54 pm
Credit: Meir Chaimowitz via Shutterstock
OpenAI will not go public this year, and Sam Altman says the reason is safety.
“I would say not 2026,” he told Fortune in an interview at the company’s San Francisco headquarters on Friday.
“Given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”
The interview was given to
Fortune’s
editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. Altman said the company had
“a lot of stuff to do”
on safety and alignment, that it would list when the business was ready and when society was ready, and that
“society needs to contend with these models at each level of capability”
. He said OpenAI was happy to delay.
In June, when the same 2027 date first surfaced, the explanation on offer was money. Altman had reportedly turned down an earlier debut at a lower price and was
holding out
for a $1tn valuation. SoftBank’s shares fell on the news, and the banks lining up for the fees were disappointed.
Before that, OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar had
told an all-hands
that the company would go public in 2027 or sooner. The company had already
filed confidentially
.
So the date has been 2027 for months, through at least three different accounts of why. Valuation, readiness, and now safety. That does not make the safety explanation untrue, and Altman is not the only person in the industry saying this sort of thing at the moment.
It does mean the delay itself is not news, and anyone reporting it as a decision taken this week has the sequence wrong.
The context around him has shifted, though, and that is real. An Anthropic researcher
resigned this month
saying the labs are gambling with people’s lives, and the warning travelled.
Yoshua Bengio has put a
10-year horizon
on the same worry. Bridgewater’s co-chief investment officer told a podcast this week that nothing will be done