CEO Sam Altman: OpenAI investors will be “patient” on IPO

You want to be public one day. >> Yes. >> But essentially, the duties of being a public company are incompatible with a dedication or focus on safety. Is that >> Not quite. Um to be a newly public company and for us to understand how to live life as a public company with, you know, pressure from investors and sort of just the all of the additional weight that comes with that while we are going through this period of adjusting to this new level of capability uh and the new safety requirements for that. We just want to get our feet under us and make sure we understand how to operate in this new way, be able to make some of these decisions in front of us without the pressure of being a newly public company. And then I think we'll be public at some point. There will be more new levels that come, but but it won't be all at the same time. >> Do you feel support from the existing cap table to just hold off 2028? Does it matter? >> Our investors seem like very happy with us and very patient. >> It's very rare, people have said, for you and Dario Amodei and Elon Musk to agree on something, this idea of pacing the frontier. And OpenAI has disclosed quite clearly, like, internal frameworks of what you plan to do. I think people are still trying to understand what the collective effort looks like. If you collaborate with your peers or you work with the administration, what does that actually result in? >> I I think one thing that would be good would be shared standards for safety cases about when you know, what you need at each level to proceed uh without undue risk. And then some sort of shared methods for ensuring that everybody is doing a good job in implementing those. And that could be independent evaluators, that could be government review, that could be companies checking each other's work. There have been many proposals there. But I think those two things would be good. >> How do you feel about the disclosure of the risk? You talked at the United Nations about it doesn't matter the percentage risk, still too great. The news cycle had Anthropic's prospectus the the existential threat to humanity disclosed in black and white. Is that incumbent on you as a Frontier Lab? I appreciate you felt confidentially, but do you just need to put it out there? >> I think this has nothing to do with going public. This is just I think our responsibility for our mission and what we're working on to do it anyway. To explain to the world the risks and benefits that we see in this sort of shifting landscape as things evolve.