Sam Altman’s first on-the-record comment on timing pushes the year’s most anticipated IPO to 2027 or later, even as revenue climbs
OpenAI will not go public in 2026, chief executive Sam Altman said, ruling out a listing this year for what would rank among the largest technology IPOs ever. “I would say not 2026,” Altman told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell in an interview published on Sept. 12, pointing to the work still ahead on AI safety and alignment.
The remark is the first on-the-record confirmation of timing from OpenAI, which has never disclosed a target date. Altman said a debut now would be premature. “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, indicating a listing could come in 2027 or later and that the company would go public when both the business and society were ready.
The comments close off a year of speculation about when the ChatGPT maker would reach the public market. OpenAI confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission in early June, an option-preserving step it disclosed itself rather than wait for the filing to leak. It was the third major AI developer to file confidentially, after Anthropic and ahead of a widening pipeline of AI listings.
The business case for a debut, meanwhile, keeps strengthening. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar, who will lead the IPO process, told Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco on Sept. 8 that enterprise revenue grew 32 per cent from June to July, against a 20 per cent rise in the company’s overall annualised revenue run rate over the same period. Friar said the enterprise and consumer businesses had moved close to parity, ahead of an internal year-end goal, and detailed a push into chip design, life sciences and financial services. Two days later, OpenAI released a version of ChatGPT aimed at banks and other financial firms, built on its GPT-6 Astra model.
The safety framing is doing real work in the decision. On September 8, Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and said he was leaving the field over safety concerns, writing that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella wrote separately that any pursuit of superintelligence “has to be grounded in the core principle” that AI must remain under human control.
For investors, the practical read is that the most valuable private company in the sector is choosing to compound as a private business for at least another year. OpenAI was reported to be valued at about $852bn at the time of its June filing, a figure that frames both the scale of the eventual offering and the cost of waiting. Anthropic and other rivals that have taken initial steps toward public markets now sit in the same holding pattern, their timing tied less to market windows than to how the safety debate resolves.
That leaves 2027 as the earliest realistic window, and ties the most consequential listing decision in technology not to rates or the IPO calendar but to when Altman judges the safety question settled enough to face public shareholders.