Altman and Musk Back AI Oversight Push, OpenAI Won't IPO

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have thrown their weight behind Dario Amodei's push for independent oversight of AI labs, a call the Anthropic CEO made as part of his broader argument for slowing down frontier AI development. Demis Hassabis, who ran DeepMind before Google folded it into its wider AI operations, offered at least partial support too. For Musk, who has warned about AI risk for years, the endorsement tracks. Altman's position is more interesting to parse.

Speaking to Fortune, Altman confirmed OpenAI won't go public this year, pointing to safety concerns, a decision he says he already told staff about back in June. That explanation sits alongside a less flattering one: OpenAI's finances may not be strong enough yet to support an IPO, particularly next to Anthropic's numbers. Neither explanation cancels the other out.

The agreement among Altman, Musk, and Hassabis isn't universal in the field. Some researchers think the entire premise behind Amodei's caution, that AI systems could rapidly improve themselves past human control, rests on shaky assumptions about how self-improving systems actually behave once real-world feedback gets involved.