According to the latest reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview, clearly stated that OpenAI will not pursue an initial public offering (IPO) in 2026. At a time when the AI boom is at its peak, this decision has drawn intense attention from the market.
📰 Key information at a glance:
“Not a wise move to go public now”: Altman said that, given the events currently unfolding around AI safety, choosing to list publicly would be “ill-advised.” He said the company is currently under no pressure to move into the public market.
AI runaway risk is increasing: Recently, security incidents have been frequent in the industry (e.g., an AI agent reportedly overreached and hacked the open-source platform Hugging Face, and multiple top security researchers have left), triggering concerns at the leadership level about technological loss of control.
Industry giants reach rare consensus: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic—OpenAI’s top rival—has just called for the industry to slow down the pace of AI development. Altman has publicly expressed agreement, saying the industry needs to jointly control the development speed of “frontier AI” and strengthen regulatory cooperation with governments around the world.
IPO may be postponed to next year: When asked whether 2026 is completely out of the question, Altman gave an affirmative answer: “Not 2026—we still have a lot of work to do on AI safety and alignment.”
(What’s interesting is that, although OpenAI hit the brakes, it’s said that Anthropic is still actively preparing for its super IPO with a valuation shock of $2 trillion.)
💡 【Personal View & Wealth Password】 What does OpenAI postponing its IPO really mean for us Crypto investors and Web3 players?
1️⃣ The “blood-letting” effect is lifted, benefiting Crypto liquidity. If OpenAI were to IPO this year, it would inevitably become the world’s capital markets’ “ultimate liquidity vacuum,” pulling away a large amount of liquidity. Now that the mega-cap is delaying its listing, it’s effectively a positive for the crypto market in this year’s fourth quarter. Funds are expected to be reallocated between U.S. tech stocks and Crypto, and some speculative hot money may flow back to crypto-native projects.
2️⃣ The logic behind AI concept coins will change. In the past year, the AI sector in the crypto market has been highly dependent on OpenAI’s moves to drive “sentiment-driven follow-on buying.” Since OpenAI won’t issue tokens and won’t list in the short term, AI coins that are merely riding the hype will face a bubble purge. In the future, capital will place more emphasis on AI+Web3 projects that have real revenue and are actually deployable.
3️⃣ “The end of AI is Web3” is proven again. Even if it means giving up an IPO on the scale of a trillion dollars, Altman still wants to solve the “AI safety and alignment” problem. This really exposes the biggest soft spot of centralized AI giants—the black-box models, data privacy, and the risk of potential wrongdoing. And this is exactly where Web3, blockchain, and decentralized compute (DePIN) can truly shine! Limit AI permissions with smart contracts and use blockchain for data provenance tracking—decentralized AI is the truly safe future.
Summary: The AI race for the long run is just beginning. Don’t pay for short-term FOMO—focus instead on hardcore cryptographic infrastructure dedicated to solving “decentralized compute” and “AI data privacy”!
