OpenAI rules out a 2026 IPO as Altman, Amodei and Musk signal a rare pact to slow AI
In a Fortune interview published Saturday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will not go public in 2026, calling it an "ill-advised moment" given unresolved AI-safety work. He suggested OpenAI and other leading labs may be nearing an agreement to jointly pace frontier development and address safety risks, and said the firm would consider pausing training rather than cross a dangerous capability threshold. The remarks landed the same day Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay urging labs to slow how fast they improve their most advanced models — and Elon Musk publicly backed the idea — an unusual moment of alignment among three fierce rivals. OpenAI had already confidentially filed IPO paperwork in June; the delay is a deliberate choice, not a lack of preparation.
Anthropic's record IPO takes shape: up to $100B at ~$2T, with Nvidia as anchor
Anthropic is in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor for what could be the largest IPO in history, Reuters reports. The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation around $2 trillion, with Nvidia considering an investment of up to $10 billion. The listing is expected before the US midterm elections in November. The deal would deepen the ties between a frontier lab and its primary compute supplier: Anthropic already relies heavily on Nvidia GPUs, has committed over $100 billion to AWS (Trainium2), and is building an in-house custom-chip team to control hardware costs. For context, Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation and says its annualized revenue run rate passed $65 billion by late July.
Mistral closes a €3B Series D led by Samsung — Europe's largest tech equity round
Mistral AI announced a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion (roughly $24B), the largest equity fundraise ever by a European technology company, three years after its founding. Samsung Electronics led the round, with the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) and existing backer PSG Equity as co-leads; new investors include Advent, BlackRock-managed funds and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Mensch framed the raise around "sovereign AI" — open-weight models plus owned infrastructure and compute — letting enterprises run frontier AI on their own terms without vendor lock-in. It follows Mistral's €1.7B ASML-led Series C in 2025, the second mega-round in twelve months anchored by a global hardware maker.
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