OpenAI delays IPO over AI safety concerns

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OpenAI will not go public until it can “make confident safety decisions,” according to chief executive Sam Altman, as the company faces a new lawsuit over its tools hacking a third party.

Altman said it was “bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public” but that the $852 billion start-up would not “barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO” at a time when AI was rapidly advancing in capabilities.

“We’re going to prioritize the mission and safety and making sure that we can very confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percentage chance we’re going to do all these bad things in the world,” Altman told reporters at the company’s annual developer day on Tuesday.

The conference comes at a moment of intense scrutiny on OpenAI’s safety practices and its performance, following a series of high-profile hacking incidents and amid intense competition from Anthropic, Meta, and others.

Warnings from AI researchers, including staff at Anthropic, that there is a 10 percent chance that runaway AI wipes out humanity in the next decade have caused a global outcry about the technology’s risks.

OpenAI, meanwhile, faces concerns about its agents misbehaving during testing and training exercises, including hacking