Sam Altman was ‘0%’ excited to be a CEO of a public company

OpenAI may be building up to one of the largest initial public offerings ever, but CEO Sam Altman is not necessarily looking forward to helming a public company.

“Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%,” Altman said in an episode of the Big Technology Podcast published in December 2025. “Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying.”

This month, OpenAI filed preliminary confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for an imminent IPO. It comes amid a blitz of announcements from tech companies taking leaps to go public, including rival Anthropic, which announced its own plans for a fall IPO the week before OpenAI’s filing. SpaceX is wrapping up its first week on the public stock market, having seen its market capitalization skyrocket above $2.5 trillion, surpassing Amazon.

The ChatGPT-maker was blunt about its decision to go public, saying in a statement it announced the filing because “we expect it to leak.”

“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the statement said. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Despite his hesitance to lead a public company—which are often under more scrutiny, greater regulatory oversight, and are associated with less influence from founders—OpenAI’s IPO wouldn’t be all bad, Altman noted.

“I do think it’s cool that public markets get to participate in value creation,” he said. “And in some sense, we will be very late to go public if you look at any previous company. It’s wonderful to be a private company. We need lots of capital. We’re going to cross all of the shareholder limits and stuff at some point.”

An IPO would pave the way for OpenAI to raise the billions of dollars needed to compete in the AI race. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI just completed a complex restructuring in October 2025 that converted it into a more traditional for-profit company, giving the nonprofit controlling the company a $130 billion stake in it. The restructuring also gave Microsoft a reduced 27% stake in the company, as well as increased research access, while simultaneously freeing up OpenAI to make deals with other cloud-computing partners.

Navigating ‘code reds’ and rivals

OpenAI’s urgency to compete with rivals was apparent last year when Altman declared a “code red” in an internal memo, following the surge of interest after Google rolled out its new Gemini 3 model in just one day, which the company said was the fastest deployment of a model into Google Search. Altman’s “code red” was an eight-week mandate to redouble OpenAI’s own efforts while temporarily postponing other initiatives, such as advertising and expanding e-commerce offerings.

While OpenAI released its own model following the eight-week period, it has continued to lose money as spending far outpaces its revenue, hemorrhaging $38.5 billion in net losses for the 2025 calendar year and an additional $3.7 billion in the first three months of 2026, Ed Zitron reported earlier this week.

To be sure, competitors have had to navigate their own obstacles ahead of going public. Last week, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to suspend its newly released Fable and Mythos models over 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 conceded a code red will not be a one-off phenomenon, but it’s also not exclusive to OpenAI. The all-out effort is a model that’s been employed by Google, and also Meta through Facebook’s more extreme “lockdown” periods. He downplayed the stakes of a code red, matching what sources told Fortune equated to a focused, but not panicked, office environment.

“I think that it’s good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges,” Altman said. “This happened to us in the past. That happened earlier this year with DeepSeek. And there was a code red back then, too.”

Altman likened the urgency of a code red to the beginning of a pandemic, where action taken at the beginning, more so than actions taken later, have an outsized impact on an outcome. He expected code reds will be a norm as the company hopes to gain distance from the likes of Google and DeepSeek.

“My guess is we’ll be doing these once, maybe twice a year, for a long time, and that’s part of really just making sure that we win in our space,” Altman said. “A lot of other companies will do great too, and I’m happy for them.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Dec. 19, 2025.