OpenAI Delays IPO as AI Safety Concerns Intensify

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar is continuing to build the company’s corporate finance operations even as its possible public-market debut remains on hold. Friar, the former CFO of Square and CEO of Nextdoor, joined OpenAI in June 2024 and is responsible for the strategic framework for an eventual public listing.

At Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco on Sept. 8, Friar said OpenAI’s enterprise revenue rose 32% from June to July. The company’s overall annualized revenue run rate increased 20% during the same period. She described expansion plans aimed at industries with complex computing and data needs, including semiconductor chip design, life sciences, and global financial services.

OpenAI also released a specialized enterprise deployment of ChatGPT on Sept. 10 for major banking institutions and capital markets firms. The service uses the company’s upgraded GPT-6 Astra model architecture, which was designed for strict institutional compliance and financial computational tasks.

The company, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research organization behind ChatGPT, has deferred its potential public market debut until at least 2027. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman confirmed the timeline in an interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, saying the company will not pursue a stock market listing in 2026. It was the startup’s first formal confirmation of its debut plans.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman said, explicitly ruling out a 2026 launch. “We got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”

OpenAI had confidentially filed for a potential IPO in June, a standard step for late-stage venture-backed companies preparing formal regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Founded in 2015 as a non-profit research institution, the organization restructured into a hybrid “capped-profit” model in 2019. It has faced persistent internal and external pressure over how to balance rapid commercial expansion with technical safeguards.

The company’s hesitation reflects wider technical and regulatory concerns as generative artificial intelligence moves rapidly into major business sectors. Questions about model alignment, safety protocols, and government oversight remain unresolved, while the broader industry weighs commercial velocity against safety risks.

Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella has emphasized the need for strict human governance over advanced models. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion into OpenAI and serves as its primary cloud computing host. In a publication on LinkedIn, Nadella stated: “Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it’s not worth pursuing.”

Concerns among technical workers have also affected Anthropic, a San Francisco-based OpenAI rival that has taken initial steps toward public markets. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives, Anthropic was established around safety methodologies such as “Constitutional AI.”

Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who completed stints at both OpenAI and Anthropic, recently resigned from Anthropic and announced that he was leaving the sector entirely. He cited existential concerns over the pace of deployment. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote in a public statement on social media platform X, prompting renewed calls across academic and policy circles to slow corporate development cycles.

As AI becomes part of enterprise operations, financial leadership priorities are changing outside the technology sector as well. A research report released by BNY said financial chiefs are increasingly treating compute costs as standard operational expenditures. The report included commentary from BNY Chief Financial Officer Dermot McDonogh.

BNY’s analysis identified “token usage”—the basic metrics used to price large language model API calls and data processing—as an emerging line item alongside traditional software licensing. It urged CFOs to pair balance sheet agility with enterprise data visibility, stating that AI tools allow corporate treasuries to streamline capital reallocation, shorten budgeting cycles, and optimize collateral management in volatile markets.

Those technology and finance shifts have coincided with executive changes at publicly traded companies. TransMedics Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: TMDX) appointed Fernando Araujo as CFO, effective Sept. 21. Araujo brings more than two decades of corporate finance experience from GE HealthCare, General Electric, and 3M.

Araujo replaces Gerardo Hernandez, who is moving into the role of commercial strategic advisor to lead TransMedics Group’s expansion into Latin American markets. FatPipe, Inc. (Nasdaq: FATN) separately promoted Kanishka Ragula to CFO, effective Sept. 11.

Ragula previously served as FatPipe’s director of finance and worked in J.P. Morgan’s Technology Investment Banking group, advising on capital raises and merger-and-acquisition deals for companies including OpenAI, StubHub, and PagerDuty. He succeeds Eric Sherb, who will remain with FatPipe in a consulting role.

JPMorganChase research has identified another pressure point for businesses beyond large-cap corporate changes. Its report, titled “Powering 10 Million Small Businesses,” said millions of aging small-business owners across the United States are nearing retirement without formal succession plans, creating capital and operational vulnerabilities across the sector.