If you were hoping to buy OpenAI stock soon, not so fast. In a video interview published Saturday, CEO Sam Altman told Fortune that taking the company public this year would be an "ill‑advised moment." He added that an IPO won't take place until next year. The company's public‑market timeline is now following its comfort level with AI's risks, not the hype cycle.
Altman didn't mince words about why the pause is happening. "I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade," he said. "I think in this moment we are entering a new era, and we'll likely have to - as we've stepped into other eras in the past - act differently to ensure that we are doing something that will ensure the idea benefits all humanity, but also ensure that no one is taking risk anywhere close to that." He also told Fortune, "I think a key principle that we should all agree on is that we cannot take actions that would risk losing control of the future to AI."
On Saturday, Altman joined Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei and xAI Corp. co‑founder and chief Elon Musk in calling for a slowdown in AI development due to growing risks to humanity. That kind of alignment among three major competitors is unusual. Broader anxiety has been building, partly after an Anthropic researcher resigned this week, saying the company was behaving recklessly and cautioning that AI could "kill us all by the end of the decade." A current Anthropic employee posted on X that the chance of such an outcome is ">10% within the next decade."
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OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO in June and says the timing is still undecided. Anthropic, meanwhile, is prepping a flotation that could exceed SpaceX's earlier‑this‑year record IPO, which was valued at $86.2 billion counting the over‑allotment option. Asked about Altman's statements, OpenAI offered no comment. For everyday investors, the signal is clear enough: even the flagship AI names are pacing themselves, and that timing is being shaped by safety debates as much as market demand.
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