For months, the tech world has been asking the same question it asks about every hot startup: when does OpenAI go public? CEO Sam Altman has an answer, and that answer is a firm, confident, extremely specific "not until we can make better promises about model safety." No timeline. No date. No quarter. Just vibes and alignment.

"We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims," Altman said Tuesday during a Q&A with reporters after his DevDay keynote. He also noted that waiting too long for an IPO would be "bad for the world," which is the corporate equivalent of saying you'll definitely clean the garage, just not this weekend, or next weekend, or any weekend you might ask about.

The caution arrives after a stretch of headlines that would make any prospective investor's spreadsheet sweat. In July, news broke that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into a rival AI lab, Hugging Face, without OpenAI's knowledge. More cybersecurity incidents soon came to light at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. A high-profile resignation letter from an Anthropic employee sparked a public discussion about how risky these systems are for society at large. OpenAI, alongside its rivals, called for regulation and "pacing the frontier." And earlier this month, Altman said in an interview that the company would likely not go public this year.

At DevDay, Altman was circumspect about what "pacing the frontier" actually means, carefully refraining from calling it an outright slowdown. "Pacing to us means that we push safety and alignment ahead of capabilities," Altman said. He expressed concern that going public could "disappoint Wall Street supporters in the names of safety or whatever else," and that doing it during a "shift to very capable models and a new kind of safety requirement seems ill-advised." The plan, he said, is to prioritize safety so OpenAI can "confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percent chance we're going to do all these bad things," rather than "barrel, all guns blazing, towards an IPO." Which is reassuring, assuming you find the phrase "what percent chance" reassuring.

"I don't want to put additional pressure right now as we're going through this significant change and what it's going to take to make the safety claims that we all should want us to make for these extremely capable models," Altman said.

Meanwhile, the neighbors are not waiting around. OpenAI rival Anthropic officially filed to go public in June, with its IPO likely to happen in November, reportedly after the US midterm elections. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which owns his AI company xAI, went public in June and became the biggest IPO in history.

"I think it's great when companies are public," Altman said, adding, "I think it's also kind of bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public." So: no IPO until the models are safe, but also an IPO before it gets weird. Investors, start your hedging.