OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation (PBC) headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops "frontier" generative AI models, particularly its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom; , ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases the GPT Image models and Codex, an AI coding agent. In March 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round with a post-money valuation of US$852 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI pure play companies in the world, rivalled only by Anthropic.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs; Musk resigned in 2018. A for-profit subsidiary was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, that is 26% owned by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI partners with the US government via the Stargate Project infrastructure venture, and with the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and arms company Anduril Industries. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab.
OpenAI has faced multiple lawsuits for alleged deaths linked to its chatbots and copyright infringement against authors and media companies. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence, but reinstated him five days later after a board reconstruction. In 2024, roughly half of OpenAI's AI safety researchers left the company, often citing the company's deprioritization of safety. Between May and July 2026, OpenAI agents gained unintended internet access and conducted autonomous hacks, including against Hugging Face and against Australia's Medicare. In September, OpenAI published a claimed proof regarding Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness, a Millennium Prize Problem in mathematics, causing a controversy over priority.
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 Musk and Altman as the co-chairs. A total of $1 billion in capital was pledged by Musk, 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 million had been received by 2021.
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." 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. In September 2016, it moved to 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
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
In December 2024, OpenAI proposed a restructuring plan to convert the capped-profit into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation (PBC), remove its profit cap, and release it from the control of the nonprofit. The nonprofit would sell its control and other assets, getting equity in return, and would use it to fund and pursue separate charitable projects, including in science and education. OpenAI's leadership described the change as necessary to secure additional investments, and stated that the nonprofit's founding mission to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity" would be better fulfilled.
The plan has been criticized by former employees. A legal letter named "Not For Private Gain" asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to intervene, stating that the restructuring is illegal and would remove governance safeguards from the nonprofit and the attorneys general. The letter argues that OpenAI's original complex structure was deliberately designed to remain accountable to its mission, without the conflicting pressure of maximizing profits. It contends that the nonprofit is best positioned to advance its mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity by continuing to control OpenAI Global, LLC, whatever the amount of equity that it could get in exchange. PBCs can choose how they balance their mission with profit-making. Controlling shareholders have a large influence on how closely a PBC sticks to its mission. OpenAI subpoenaed six nonprofit organizations that opposed its for-profit transition, which the organizations described as an attempt to silence them.
On October 28, 2025, OpenAI announced that it had adopted the new PBC corporate structure after receiving approval from the attorneys general of California and Delaware. Under the new structure, OpenAI's for-profit branch became a PBC known as OpenAI Group PBC, while the nonprofit was renamed to the OpenAI Foundation. The OpenAI Foundation holds a 26% stake in the PBC, while Microsoft holds a 27% stake and the remaining 47% is owned by employees and other investors.
All members of the OpenAI Group PBC board of directors are to be appointed by the OpenAI Foundation, which can remove them at any time. As of April 2026, all but one of the board members of the OpenAI Foundation were also board members of OpenAI Group PBC. In April 2026, co-founder Musk revised his lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman to seek the reversal of OpenAI's corporate restructuring. Musk lost the lawsuit in May 2026, with the jury concluding that he waited beyond the three-year statute of limitations to sue OpenAI.
Altman stated that an initial public offering (IPO) was the most likely path forward. On June 8, 2026, OpenAI confirmed it filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but stated "it could be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company." Altman confirmed in September that the IPO was delayed until 2027.
Partnership with Microsoft Following its original $1 billion investment in 2019 which began an AI boom, Microsoft invested another $2 billion through 2022. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced an additional $10 billion investment in OpenAI over multiple years, of which a significant portion would be used to purchase compute on Microsoft Azure. These investments were made at a $29 billion valuation, double OpenAI's 2021 valuation. Later that year, Microsoft began using OpenAI models for its Copilot chatbot, integrated Copilot into Windows, and released mobile Copilot apps.
Following OpenAI's 2025 restructuring, Microsoft owned a 27% stake in the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC, valued at $135 billion. In a deal announced the same day, OpenAI agreed to purchase $250 billion of Azure services, with Microsoft ceding their right of first refusal over OpenAI's future cloud computing purchases. As part of the deal, OpenAI will continue to share 20% of its revenue with Microsoft until it achieves AGI, which must now be verified by an independent panel of experts. The deal also loosened restrictions on both companies working with third parties, allowing Microsoft to pursue AGI independently and allowing OpenAI to develop products with other companies.
In April 2026, the two firms announced a new agreement which removed many of the more restrictive aspects of their partnership. No longer the exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft then had the first right to provide cloud services, but OpenAI could purchase other services in the event that Microsoft did not provide sufficient capacity. OpenAI will no longer receive a portion of Microsoft's revenue from using OpenAI's technology. The clause, which created uncertainty for Microsoft in the event OpenAI determined that OpenAI had created AGI, was dropped.
Finances