‘Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,’ Sam Altman said.

OpenAI is not going public this year, CEO Sam Altman told Fortune last Friday (11 September).

“Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he told the publication, reasoning that AI safety should take priority over a blockbuster initial public offering. “We’ll do it when we’re ready.”

“I would say not 2026 … 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.”

The ChatGPT creator filed to go public in June this year, but said that it could be a “while” before it ceases to be a private company. Later that month, reports emerged suggesting that Altman was delaying plans in hopes that a public debut would value OpenAI at $1trn or more.

The company’s biggest rival, Anthropic, is seemingly steamrolling ahead, with investors expecting the company to raise funds at a valuation of at least $2trn – doubling its initial target of $1trn and dwarfing SpaceX as the largest public listing in history. Reuters reported that Nvidia is expected to pump up to $10bn into an Anthropic IPO.

The two AI companies’ IPO plans come amid a time of heightened scrutiny around AI safety, especially after the launch of Anthropic’s cybersecurity model Mythos 5, which, alongside OpenAI’s models, escaped its training containment to hack real organisations.

Last week, a former Anthropic researcher (who also worked at OpenAI), accused both companies of acting irresponsibly when developing AI systems.

“At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalised the civilisational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first,” Jacob Coxon wrote in a post on X.

Later that week, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei said that AI development must be slowed down. “Since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” he wrote in a blogpost. The Claude creator, he said, will use embedded third-party evaluators to verify AI safeguards moving forward.

Altman also made similar commitments in a company-wide meeting, according to Bloomberg. Speaking to Fortune, the CEO said that OpenAI would be “incredibly profitable” even if the pace of development at the company is slow.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the World Economic Forum 2024. Image: World Economic Forum/Benedikt von Loebell via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)