“When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, “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.””
Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won’t go public this year, saying an IPO now would come at an ‘ill-advised moment’ given AI safety concernsfortune.com
Safety as the public reason for waiting until 2027 only holds up if the private reasons are weaker, and I’m not convinced they are. Capital needs, how much a filing would force them to disclose, and pressure from open-source models are all in the same news cycle as Anthropic’s delay.
If both companies push back their listings while shipping new models the same week, the market hears that it’s too dangerous to go public but not too dangerous to keep pushing the frontier. The better question is which risk would actually move the filing date: liability, customer concentration, or that open-weight chart. “Safety” is the headline word, not the answer.