• All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2026".

• For the 2025 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.

• You can find all the markets under the tag [2026 Forbes AI predictions].

• Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2026's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.

• I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.

Description of this prediction from the article:

You can never complain that my predictions aren’t provocative!

OpenAI has been one of the hottest and fastest-growing companies in the world over the past few years. So why on earth would the company and its CEO part ways in 2026?

OpenAI has enjoyed an aura of charmed invincibility since the 2022 debut of ChatGPT. It seemed the company could do no wrong. That has recently changed abruptly with the launch of Google’s Gemini 3. The public narrative and vibe has rapidly shifted; it has become an increasingly consensus take that it is in fact Google and not OpenAI that is best positioned to win the AI race.

OpenAI under Sam Altman is a company with sprawling ambitions. Beyond its core business of building and commercializing AI models, the company has partnered with Jony Ive to develop a next-generation consumer hardware device; it is developing its own semiconductors; it is building its own data centers; it is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a brain-computer interface startup that Altman is cofounding; it is exploring acquiring a rocket (!) company.

When everything is smooth sailing, these diverse activities can be seen as evidence of the company’s unbounded upside, its unfettered ambition, its inevitable trajectory to conquer the world.

With OpenAI coming back down to earth, though — with its models no longer state-of-the-art, with ChatGPT losing market share to Gemini — all these far-flung investments in disparate areas may suddenly start to look like, well, distractions. It may suddenly seem natural to ask the question: if OpenAI’s core market (generative AI) is one of the biggest in the world, and that market is under serious threat from formidable competitors, ought not the company and its leadership be focusing entirely on that?

Compounding this dynamic is the fact that OpenAI will be under growing pressure to go public. As discussed above, OpenAI has raised a lot of money from a lot of investors over the past few years, many of them crossover investors whose primary focus is public markets. This investor base wants an IPO sooner rather than later in order to get liquidity. Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an IPO as soon as 2026, which will put added pressure on OpenAI to do the same. The simple reality is that OpenAI has such vast capital needs — more than any other company in history — that it eventually will have no choice but to IPO in order to tap public capital markets.

Public companies are heavily scrutinized and regulated. They must be operated in a fundamentally different — and more disciplined — way than private companies. The analogy is far from perfect, but when Uber was preparing itself to be a public company, it swapped out its visionary and distractable founding CEO (Travis Kalanick) for a professional CEO with public company experience (Dara Khosrowshahi). Might OpenAI be approaching its “Dara era”?

Add to this another consideration: it is not totally clear that Altman wants to be in charge of running OpenAI on a day-to-day basis, with all of the mundane minutiae that entails. Earlier this year, Altman announced that OpenAI was hiring Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as its “CEO of Applications.” In explaining the hire, Altman wrote that Simo would “focus on enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale as we enter a new phase of growth," while Altman himself would “increase my focus on Research, Compute and Safety Systems.” How many companies can you think of that have multiple people with a “CEO” title?

In 2026, OpenAI’s board and leadership, including Altman himself, will come to the conclusion that Altman is no longer the best person to lead the organization as it prepares for life as a public company. Will OpenAI’s board fire Altman? Will Altman choose to step down and move on to his next chapter? The reality is that the public won’t know, and it won’t really matter. Unlike the dramatic events of November 2023, in which OpenAI’s board shocked the world by abruptly firing Altman, this transition will be tightly choreographed. It will be portrayed as Altman’s decision. He will announce the news on his terms.

The most logical choice as OpenAI’s next CEO will be Fidji Simo, who previously took Instacart public.

And, to be clear, Sam Altman will not be leaving the spotlight. He will have plenty of ventures in chips, data centers, space, BCI and more for many years to come.