OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says his company will not go public this year, citing growing concerns about AI safety.In an interview with Fortune published Saturday, Altman said that an IPO now would be "ill-advised." The decision pushes one of the most anticipated IPOs in history until at least 2027 and gives the clearest sign yet that mounting concerns about increasingly powerful AI are beginning to reshape the industry's business plans.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees just last month that the company would likely go public in 2027 or even sooner, if "our business continues to inflect." Altman's comments came on the same day that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models. Altman and Elon Musk quickly backed the proposal in social media posts, an unusual show of agreement among three fierce rivals.In his essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI." Anthropic is actively gearing up for what is expected to be a historic IPO, though the company has not officially disclosed when it plans to debut. The sudden alignment among Altman, Amodei and Musk shows how quickly concern over AI has moved from the margins to the center of the industry — and is now beginning to collide with its enormous commercial ambitions.
The essay urged artificial intelligence companies to pace how quickly they improve model capabilities. The move comes amid a growing chorus of researchers calling for a coordinated deceleration.
Amodei proposed a three-step plan that he said will help temper the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI," though he conceded that some steps may be easier to achieve than others.
Pressure is building in Washington, where lawmakers in both parties are calling for new AI safeguards and demanding tech leaders testify after a rash of cyberattacks were carried out without direct human control.
Beyond the nation's capital, state and local officials are also confronting growing outrage against AI data centers and their demands on power, water and communities. With midterm elections approaching, AI is becoming a key issue for both parties.
Concerns around AI's capabilities
Anthropic has "unilaterally" committed to the first step of the plan, Amodei said, which grants third-party evaluators employee-level access to the company to verify safety practices and report incidents. The second step encourages leading AI companies within democratic countries to coordinate and establish common safety standards, and the third calls for coordination between democratic governments and authoritarian governments.
"To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this," Amodei wrote.
The essay landed after an Anthropic researcher set off a firestorm on social media this week by announcing he quit his job at the company. Jacob Coxon, who has also worked as a researcher at Anthropic's chief rival, OpenAI, said he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives." He said the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
While extreme, concerns about the potential for AI to cause human extinction or other catastrophic events are not new in AI research circles. In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including Amodei and OpenAI's Altman, signed a statement that said, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
Amodei said Saturday that while pausing or slowing AI development has been floated since 2023, it made "little sense" to do so at that time. He said models were not powerful enough to take action in the real world at that point, and they were also not yet capable of "significant deception, manipulation, cheating, or cyberattacks."
"I continue to believe that AI can enormously improve the quality of human life. My desire to achieve these benefits is undimmed," Amodei wrote. "But the benefits will only be achieved if we build the technology in the right way, and — so long as we use the time we gain well — it is worth taking unusually deliberate care to get it right."
After his essay published, Amodei emphasized that finding the right speed of development will be paramount. Slowing down too much could give autocratic governments an edge, he said in a CNN interview that aired later Saturday.
"If we go too slow, I still believe that the wrong people will be in charge of the technology. And that, again, will bring the probability of things going wrong very high," he said.
Sarah Heck, Anthropic's head of public policy, lauded the essay and called on lawmakers to do their part in building guardrails.
"The government has a critical role to play here, including blocking the sale of the most advanced chips to adversarial nations like China, enacting a national law requiring testing of frontier models, with the power to block the most advanced models that prove to be unsafe," she said, in an X post.
Support for a voluntary slowdown
Amodei's essay received cheers from many industry researchers and executives on Saturday, including Altman. In a post on X, Altman said he agreed with Amodei that the industry needs to pace the development of advanced AI capabilities. Altman said the subject has been a "primary topic" of discussion at OpenAI in recent weeks.
"Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same," Altman said. "We'll have more to share soon."
Earlier this month, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post warning that no AI company has "solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work by AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions.
Pachocki said he expects and hopes for voluntary slowdowns to become "commonplace until shared safety bars are established."
Musk also expressed support for a slowdown on Saturday, writing in a post on X that, "Dario is right."
Musk, whose competing AI startup xAI was acquired by his rocket company SpaceX earlier this year, used to be a vocal critic of Anthropic. He previously said the company "hates Western Civilization," and is "doomed to become the opposite of its name," which would be misanthropic. But since Anthropic announced a major compute deal with SpaceX in May, Musk has largely changed his tune.
"Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing," Musk wrote at the time. "No one set off my evil detector."
Amodei wrote Saturday that he believes AI could still "dramatically raise the quality of human life," but that the risks need to be taken seriously.
"I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong," he said.
WATCH: Anthropic AI researcher says company is ‘gambling with our lives’
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar.
