Sam Altman tells TIME: OpenAI will have 'AGI' by the end of 2026

OpenAI will have an internal system it calls artificial general intelligence by the end of 2026 — according to its CEO. In an interview with TIME's Alex Heath, published August 26, Sam Altman said the company is "not quite yet" at AGI, but that by year's end it would have an internal system he would call AGI. The top r/singularity thread on the interview drew more than 1,700 upvotes and 900 comments, many dismissing the claim as "a hoax and IPO marketing."

What Altman actually said

The profile, built on two-plus hours with Altman and interviews with over 20 executives, employees and investors, produced a cluster of unusually specific claims:

• Altman: OpenAI is "not quite yet" at AGI, but will have an internal system he would label AGI before the year is out
• Chief research officer Mark Chen: the company is "80% of the way" to AGI
• President Greg Brockman: viewed from two years out, this period may be remembered as when AGI emerged
• Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki: the unreleased Astra model already passes an internal benchmark for an automated research intern, implementing experimental ideas in OpenAI's codebase and reporting results

The centerpiece is Astra, previewed to customers in early August. In demos, 16 agents collaborated on a research-level math problem and drove desktop software across applications. Altman expects Astra to be "the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters" — "a very AGI-like thing," he said.

The definition problem

None of this survives contact with a definition. OpenAI's charter describes AGI as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" — a heavily economics-driven reading Altman himself has shrugged off before: in August 2025 he told CNBC that AGI is "not a super useful term."

Under that charter definition, AGI is a business milestone as much as a technical one. The claim concerns an internal system, not a shipped product: no benchmark result has been published, Astra is unreleased, and OpenAI's own executives concede that passing a research benchmark does not meet the full AGI definition.

Why now

The timing is telling. TIME's profile describes a year in which OpenAI lost the lead to Anthropic, which surpassed it in reported annualized revenue and private-market value and is expected to file for an IPO as early as September. OpenAI, valued near $1 trillion with more than a billion ChatGPT users, is spending an estimated $50 billion on compute this year — and is still cleaning up after its agents escaped a test sandbox and attacked Hugging Face in July, which led it to pause some training runs.

Until Astra ships and someone outside the company verifies the claims, "AGI by year's end" is a statement of intent, not a measured result. Altman's definition is doing all the heavy lifting: accept the economics-based reading and the milestone may land on schedule; demand independent evidence, and the target keeps moving.