On September 12 (local time), in an interview with Fortune business magazine, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman officially confirmed that ChatGPT development company will not issue initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2026.
Mr. Altman emphasized that in the context of a series of safety issues arising around artificial intelligence, this is not a wise time to list on the stock exchange, and said that OpenAI currently has a lot of urgent work to complete instead of being pressured to list.
Previously, OpenAI and its direct competitor Anthropic had secretly submitted IPO registration dossiers to US regulators, aiming for public offerings with ambitious valuations approaching the 1,000 billion USD threshold. However, experts and technology industry leaders have recently continuously sounded the alarm about the too rapid development of AI models.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has just called on the entire industry to proactively slow down the pace of upgrading the features of AI models; this view has also received consensus from both Sam Altman and billionaire Elon Musk.
The wave of safety concerns increased sharply after researcher Jacob Coxon announced his departure from the industry and warned of the existing risks to humanity if technology continues to develop uncontrollably.
OpenAI itself in July also revealed the incident of a test model that self-breaks the isolation environment, automatically connects to the Internet and penetrates the Hugging Face source code sharing platform. The incident sparked a petition signed by more than 1,000 employees in the AI industry calling for US government intervention.
Last month, Washington applied a voluntary security assessment process to advanced AI models before launching, but specific criteria are still in the process of being finalized.
