OpenAI will not go public until it can “make confident safety decisions,” according to chief executive Sam Altman, as the company faces a new lawsuit over its tools hacking a third party.

Altman said it was “bad for the world if OpenAI waits too long to go public” but that the $852 billion start-up would not “barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO” at a time when AI was rapidly advancing in capabilities.

“We’re going to prioritize the mission and safety and making sure that we can very confidently scale to the next stage of AI without people debating what percentage chance we’re going to do all these bad things in the world,” Altman told reporters at the company’s annual developer day on Tuesday.

The conference comes at a moment of intense scrutiny on OpenAI’s safety practices and its performance, following a series of high-profile hacking incidents and amid intense competition from Anthropic, Meta, and others.

Warnings from AI researchers, including staff at Anthropic, that there is a 10 percent chance that runaway AI wipes out humanity in the next decade have caused a global outcry about the technology’s risks.

OpenAI, meanwhile, faces concerns about its agents misbehaving during testing and training exercises, including hacking into the start-up Hugging Face and government websites.

The AI lab has admitted it took weeks or months to spot these incidents within its systems and that dozens of websites and organizations could be implicated.

Protest groups camped outside the company’s developer conference on Tuesday carried placards urging OpenAI to “put people over profit.”

On Tuesday, a non-profit legal organization called Legal Advocates for Safe Science & Technology (LASST) filed a lawsuit in California seeking to ensure OpenAI takes a more robust approach to AI development, including better evaluation, monitoring, and training practices.

The group said their suit against OpenAI was the first of its kind, as analysts warn the start-up could face a wave of novel legal claims.

“Given what we see in terms of progress and development [in AI], the frequency and sophistication of these hacking instances are only going to increase,” said Vivian Dong, programs director at LASST.

“We definitely feel we need new regulations and laws, but at the same time it’s currently illegal to hack a third-party system, it’s a crime… I suspect OpenAI are very aware of the legal risks of what their agents are doing,” Dong added.

Having already pushed its IPO to next year, OpenAI is in talks with investors about a new private funding round. The company is seeking to raise $30 billion or more at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. The $30 billion target was first reported by Bloomberg.

The company is hoping to extend an upturn in its commercial fortunes and tackle a growing threat from rivals with the release of new AI assistants called Dots, represented by cuddly avatars.

Meta’s share price has risen about 18 percent since it launched its own AI personal assistant called Muse on September 8.

OpenAI’s Dots could be used by influencers to draft social media posts or by scientists to evaluate evidence launch, said OpenAI, which aims to capitalize on the huge commercial opportunity of providing personal intelligence to customers.

The start-up’s annualized revenue has grown more than 70 percent since July, when it released GPT-5.6, and is now about $70 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the group’s finances.

The $852 billion company is also exploring new ways to monetize its existing AI models and extend its reach beyond the 1.2 billion consumers and enterprise users it currently claims.

OpenAI will also have to convince customers that Dots will be reliable enough to play a role in users’ personal and work life.

That effort has taken on renewed importance amid OpenAI’s calls for rival labs to slow the pace of development of new models. On Monday, OpenAI said it was scrapping the planned release of its latest model, citing safety concerns.

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