Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t go public until its models are safe

For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public. CEO Sam Altman says it won’t happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight. “We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims,” Altman said Tuesday during a Q&A with reporters after his DevDay keynote. At the same time, he said, waiting too long for an IPO would be “bad for the world.”

Altman’s comments come after months of controversy about whether or not OpenAI and its rivals can control their own creations. In July, news broke that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into a rival AI lab, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge. More cybersecurity incidents soon came to light at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. A high-profile resignation letter from an Anthropic employee sparked a public discussion about how risky these systems are for society at large. OpenAI, alongside its rivals, called for regulation and “pacing the frontier.” And earlier this month, Altman said in an interview that the company would likely not go public this year.

At DevDay, Altman was circumspect about what “pacing the frontier” actually meant, refraining from calling it an outright slowdown. “Pacing to us means that we push safety and alignment ahead of capabilities,” Altman said. But he expressed concerns that going public could create the potential to “disappoint Wall Street supporters in the names of safety or whatever else,” and that doing it during a “shift to very capable models and a new kind of safety requirement seems ill-advised.” He said OpenAI would prioritize safety to “confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percent chance we’re going to do all these bad things,” rather than “barrel, all guns blazing, towards an IPO.”

“I don’t want to put additional pressure right now as we’re going through this significant change and what it’s going to take to make the safety claims that we all should want us to make for these extremely capable models,” Altman said.

OpenAI rival Anthropic officially filed to go public in June, with its IPO likely to happen in November, reportedly after the US midterm elections. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns his AI company xAI, went public in June and became the biggest IPO in history.

“I think it’s great when companies are public,” Altman said, adding, “I think it’s also kind of bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public.”