OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in San Francisco, consisting of OpenAI Group PBC, a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC), partially controlled by OpenAI Foundation, a nonprofit. OpenAI develops generative AI models, particularly the GPT series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom, and widespread interest in generative AI.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 in Delaware as a nonprofit. A for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into a PBC that is 26% owned by the nonprofit. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI, and provides Azure cloud computing resources. In October 2025, OpenAI conducted a $6.6 billion share sale that valued the company at $500 billion.

In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of OpenAI's products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's deprioritization of safety goals.

Founding

In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as the nonprofit organization OpenAI, Inc., by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Infosys. However, the actual capital collected significantly lagged pledges. According to tax filings, only $133.2 million had been received by 2021.

Elon Musk stated in 2015 that he was partly motivated by concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence. OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". The startup also wrote that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible", and that "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest." Co-chair Sam Altman expected a decades-long project that eventually surpasses human intelligence.

In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. OpenAI was initially run from Brockman's living room. It was later headquartered at the Pioneer Building in the Mission District, San Francisco.

Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of deep learning, and drew up a list of great AI researchers. Brockman was able to hire nine of them as the first employees in December 2015. OpenAI did not pay AI researchers salaries comparable to those of Facebook or Google. It also did not pay stock options which AI researchers typically get. Nevertheless, OpenAI spent $7 million on its first 52 employees in 2016. OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead.

In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", its platform for reinforcement learning research. Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours. In December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites, and other applications.

Corporate structure

Transition from nonprofit

Creation of for-profit subsidiaries (2019)

In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from nonprofit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit being capped at 100 times any investment. OpenAI formed three subsidiaries: the holding company OpenAI LP, the holding company OpenAI GP LLC, and the capped for-profit company OpenAI Global, LLC. The holding company OpenAI LP was owned by the nonprofit OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI employees, and investors, whereas OpenAI Global, LLC, was owned by OpenAI LP and Microsoft, the latter of which had a minority non-voting stake. The nonprofit OpenAI, Inc., controlled OpenAI GP LLC, which in turn controlled OpenAI LP and OpenAI Global, LLC.

OpenAI stated that the capped-profit model would allow it to legally attract investment from venture funds and compensate employees with equity as competing AI companies did. Microsoft subsequently invested $1 billion in OpenAI LP, and OpenAI's services were migrated to Microsoft Azure. Since then, OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based supercomputing platform.

The 2019 restructuring made the nonprofit OpenAI, Inc., the only controlling shareholder of OpenAI LP, which retained a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI, Inc.'s nonprofit charter. A majority of OpenAI, Inc.'s board was barred from having financial stakes in OpenAI LP. In addition, minority members with a stake in OpenAI LP were barred from certain votes due to conflict of interest. Some researchers have argued that OpenAI's switch to for-profit status was inconsistent with OpenAI's claims to be "democratizing" AI.

Conversion to public benefit corporation (2025)…