“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 during a Q&A with reporters after his keynote address at OpenAI DevDay 2026, The Verge reported.
Altman said taking OpenAI public while the company is transitioning to more capable models and facing new safety requirements could pressure it to prioritise investor expectations over safety.
“Pacing, to us, means that we push safety and alignment ahead of capabilities,” he said as quoted by The Verge. Altman added that he did not want OpenAI to “barrel, all guns blazing, towards an IPO”.
OpenAI has pushed back its IPO plans as it focuses on the next phase of its AI development. The company is now seeking to raise at least $30 billion from investors in a new funding round at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reported earlier on Wednesday.
Altman said the company wants to reach a point where it can “confidently scale to the next stage of AI” without continued debate over the potential risks posed by increasingly capable models.
“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,” he said.
His comments come amid growing scrutiny of AI safety and the ability of companies to control increasingly capable models. OpenAI and other major AI companies have faced a series of cybersecurity incidents after AI agents breached real-world systems during testing, including an OpenAI model that accessed and attacked developer platform Hugging Face without the company’s knowledge. Similar incidents involving models from Anthropic, Meta and Google have also been reported.
Altman had also said earlier this month that OpenAI was unlikely to go public this year.
Meanwhile, Claude-maker Anthropic, which confidentially filed for an IPO in June, has now publicly filed its prospectus, with the listing expected after the US midterm elections in November. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns his AI company xAI, went public in June.
While stressing the need for stronger safety assurances before taking OpenAI public, Altman said there could also be downsides to delaying the move indefinitely, The Verge reported.
“I think it’s great when companies are public,” he said. “I think it’s also kind of bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public.”
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