Sam Altman delays OpenAI IPO to 2027, citing AI safety risks

OpenAI will not go public in 2026. CEO Sam Altman told Fortune that a listing this year would be ‘ill-advised’ and pushed the timeline to 2027, citing safety concerns. The decision came out of an exclusive, hour-long conversation for Fortune’s Titans podcast, recorded in San Francisco. According to Fortune’s reporting, the interview took place on September 12, 2026, during a month when public anxiety about AI had already reached a boiling point. What Altman actually said Altman framed the IPO delay as a way to firm up safety and alignment work before OpenAI faces the pressures of public markets. Alignment is the effort to make AI systems reliably do what humans intend, rather than something adjacent and possibly worse. He was also candid that waiting has costs. Altman acknowledged that an extended delay could carry its own risks, so this is a postponement rather than an open-ended pause. He laid out two outcomes he considers unacceptable. The first is humans losing control over AI systems. The second is an extreme concentration of power in the hands of a few entities. The starkest moment involved probabilities. Altman said that even an approximately 10% chance of AI causing human e...