Anthropic continues IPO plans despite shared warnings
OpenAI will not hold its initial public offering in 2026, CEO Sam Altman said in a Fortune interview published Saturday, citing concerns about artificial intelligence safety. The announcement comes as Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival AI lab, moves ahead with its own listing and as US lawmakers from both parties press for new rules to govern advanced AI systems.
“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune. Asked whether the company was now targeting 2027, Altman said: “I would say not 2026. Yeah, 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 announcement lands against a backdrop of escalating warnings about AI’s potential risks. Growing numbers of US lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have called for new rules to govern AI systems after warnings from two researchers from Anthropic that rapidly progressing artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of the human race “in the not-too-distant future,” The Guardian reported. The Guardian’s reporting added that the warnings followed cases of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems and AI safety researchers quitting their companies over concerns about the technology’s risks.
The New York Times in June reported that the San Francisco-based OpenAI was considering whether to hold off on a potentially trillion-dollar IPO until next year. At the time, shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX were tumbling after a surge that had sent that company’s valuation to $1.8tn.
In the Fortune interview, Altman also suggested that OpenAI and other leading AI companies may be close to announcing an agreement to slow AI development and work together to address safety risks, Fortune reported. Separately on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged AI companies to take a more deliberate approach to development.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in an essay shared on social media. Altman responded on the X platform: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”
Safety concerns have not slowed down Anthropic’s own IPO plans. Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the US midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter told Reuters this month.