OpenAI may be on track for the largest initial public offering in history, but CEO Sam Altman isn’t necessarily looking forward to taking the helm of a public company.
“Am I excited about being the CEO of a publicly traded company? 0%,” Altman said on an episode of the show. big tech podcast “Am I excited about OpenAI becoming a public company? In some ways I am, and in some ways I think it’s really annoying.”
This month, OpenAI filed preliminary confidential filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, preparing for an impending IPO. This comes amid a flurry of announcements of tech companies poised to go public, including rival Anthropic, which announced its own plans for a fall IPO the week before OpenAI’s filing. SpaceX’s market capitalization has soared to more than $2.5 trillion, and it is ending its first week of trading ahead of Amazon.
The creators of ChatGPT were candid about their decision to go public, saying in a statement that they were announcing the application because they “anticipate information leaks.”
“We have not decided on the timing yet, but it may take some time as it may be easier for a private company to do so,” it said in a statement. “However, this is a complex set of trade-offs that ultimately gives us the option to go public sooner if that is in our best interest.”
Altman noted that despite his reluctance to lead a public company, which is subject to greater oversight and regulation and whose founders often have less influence, OpenAI’s IPO is not a bad thing.
“I think it’s great that the public markets can participate in value creation,” he says. “And in some ways, if you look at companies historically, we’re going to be very late to go public. Being a private company is great. We need a lot of capital. We’re going to be over all shareholder limits and all that at some point.”
An IPO would pave the way for OpenAI to raise the billions of dollars it needs to join the AI race. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI completed a complex restructuring in October 2025, converting it into a more traditional for-profit company and granting $130 billion in stock to the nonprofit that controls it. The reorganization reduced Microsoft’s stake in the company by 27% and increased access to research, while also allowing OpenAI to do business with other cloud computing partners.
Navigating “Code Red” and Rivals
OpenAI’s rush to compete with its competitors was evidenced by interest piqued by Google’s unveiling of its new Gemini 3 model in just one day, and last year’s internal memo from Altman declaring “Code Red,” which the company said was the fastest model deployment to Google Search. Altman’s “Code Red” was an eight-week order to double down on OpenAI’s own efforts while temporarily delaying other efforts, such as expanding advertising and e-commerce services.
OpenAI released its own model after an eight-week period, but continues to lose money as its spending far exceeds its revenue, with a net loss of $38.5 billion in calendar year 2025 and an additional $3.7 billion in the first three months of 2026, Ed Zitron reported earlier this week.
To be sure, competitors had to overcome their own hurdles before going public. Last week, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend its newly released Fable and Mythos models citing national security concerns, the latest in a series of tensions between the Trump administration and the company after the Pentagon deemed Anthropic a “supply chain risk” in March.
Altman previously acknowledged that Code Red is not a one-time phenomenon, but it’s not unique to OpenAI. This all-hands-on-deck effort is a model that has been adopted by not only Google but also Meta throughout Facebook’s more extreme “lockdown” period. He echoed sources and downplayed the risk of Code Red. luck This corresponds to an office environment where you are focused but not panicked.
“I think it’s good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat presents itself,” Altman said. “This has happened to us in the past. It happened with DeepSeek earlier this year, and we had a code red back then as well.”
Altman likened the urgency of Code Red to the beginning of a pandemic, where actions taken at the beginning have a greater impact on outcomes than actions taken later. He expected Code Red to become the norm as the company wants to distance itself from the likes of Google and DeepSeek.
“I think we’ll be doing these things once, maybe twice a year, over a long period of time. It’s part of making sure we win in this space,” Altman said. “Many other companies will do great things too, and I’m happy for them.”
A version of this article was published on Fortune.com on December 19, 2025..
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