Altman: IPO unlikely this year
Por Chase DiFeliciantonio — POLITICO – TOP Stories
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he didn’t think the company’s highly anticipated IPO would happen this year, in an interview released Saturday.
“Now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said. “I would say not 2026,” Altman added.
Altman made the comments in a Fortune interview after the company confidentially filed paperwork over the summer for an IPO, which fueled speculation of a market debut this year.
The comments come as autonomous hacks and cybersecurity incidents by OpenAI programs continue to come to light. Those instances have increased fears that rogue AI could take over the internet or worse.
Calls for change
Separately on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down, or “pacing,” frontier AI development in the face of the risks posed by the increasingly powerful technology, as well as providing outside evaluators access to the company’s systems “so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents and assess models’ alignment during training.”
Altman reposted Amodei’s statement, saying giving outside evaluators access “is a great idea.”
“Dario is right,” wrote Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, which makes the Grok chatbot.
A letter from earlier this year, signed by Amodei and top researchers from OpenAI and Google, made similar calls to pace frontier AI development.
Anthropic is still widely expected to go public this year, but no official date has been set.
Setting the table
Notably, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a measure into law that would create a state registry and ethics rules for outside AI evaluators. A separate law he signed would task the state with establishing criteria for and checking the qualifications of so-called Independent Verification Organizations and their expertise in assessing the risks posed by AI systems.
Both pieces of legislation received the backing of Anthropic and OpenAI in the final days of the state’s legislative process.
The background
More catastrophic risks came into national focus after a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher spoke out this past week, saying the industry is in a race to develop technology that could spiral out of control and destroy society, leading to calls from California to Washington for increased AI safety efforts.
President Donald Trump and some other Republicans have downplayed the catastrophic risk concerns this week, saying the nation needs to beat China in the race to develop the technology.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently said he is investigating the autonomous hack of startup Hugging Face by OpenAI programs, and a coalition of red-state attorneys general are also looking into the issue.
Anthropic and Meta have also disclosed instances in which their AI programs executed autonomous cyberattacks.
Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories
