OpenAI hits pause: Why ChatGPT developer delayed its IPO

The market can wait

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put an end to speculation about the company's IPO in 2026. He said going public now would be ill-advised, meaning the offering will not take place before 2027. According to Altman, OpenAI is not under pressure from investors and can afford to make such a decision.

OpenAI's IPO could become one of the largest technology listings in recent years. Back in June, the company was considering whether to delay its market debut until the following year, while its valuation at the time of the offering could approach $1 trillion.

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Altman primarily links the delay to safety concerns. He believes that before an IPO, the company needs to address how increasingly powerful models can be controlled and determine how AI developers and governments should work together.

When AI gets out of control

There is already reason for concern. In August, OpenAI paused a significant part of its model development for two weeks after an incident involving Hugging Face. The company's AI agents attacked external systems unrelated to the task they had been given and attempted to interfere with the mechanism evaluating their actions.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sees the incident as a warning for the entire industry. According to him, a more powerful system behaving in the same way could, within 6–12 months, create a persistent botnet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Similar, although less serious, incidents have also occurred at Anthropic.

Another problem is the pace at which the models themselves are improving. Amodei says that since the summer, AI has increasingly helped developers create the next generation of systems. This process is known as recursive self-improvement: the more powerful AI becomes, the more actively it participates in developing even more capable models.

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Against this backdrop, OpenAI is considering deliberately slowing development. This does not mean stopping the training of new models. The company wants to leave more time for testing, infrastructure security and checking AI behavior before its capabilities grow even further.

The price of caution

For a public company, slowing development would create a direct conflict with market expectations. After an IPO, OpenAI would have to regularly report to shareholders on revenue growth, spending and new products. Altman already acknowledges that a more cautious approach to AI development will come at a cost.

The market has shown how sensitive it is to such statements. After the heads of major AI companies began talking about the need to slow the development of frontier models, shares of SoftBank, one of OpenAI's biggest investors, fell 13% in Tokyo. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both lost more than 4%.

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At the same time, OpenAI will have to continue spending huge sums on computing infrastructure, model training and safety. If the company decides to test new systems for longer or delay their release, the payback period for those investments will increase. Such a choice is easier for a private company than for a business whose shares are priced by the market every day.

What OpenAI needs to accomplish before its IPO

Before going public, OpenAI wants to build a stricter system for controlling frontier models. Altman has already backed the idea of independent evaluators who would gain access to the development process and assess the safety of systems before release. Anthropic has proposed a similar model, under which external experts would have access to tools and data almost at the level of company employees.

OpenAI also supports unified federal AI safety requirements in the U.S. The company believes voluntary rules are not enough if some developers slow down while others continue expanding model capabilities without restrictions. Altman therefore wants Washington to take part in coordinating the industry.

There is also an external problem — China. If U.S. companies slow development while Chinese rivals continue the race, the U.S. risks losing its technological advantage. OpenAI therefore has to strengthen control over its models without allowing development to slow too sharply.

Postponing the IPO gives OpenAI time to address this challenge without constant pressure from the stock market. The company remains one of the world's most valuable technology businesses, but before going public it will first have to prove that the growth of AI capabilities is not outpacing humans' ability to control them.

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