# OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence public benefit corporation, founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and restructured in 2019, known for developing the GPT model series and launching ChatGPT, which accelerated the AI boom.

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product company headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded in December 2015 by [sam-altman](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/sam-altman), [elon-musk](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/elon-musk), [greg-brockman](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/greg-brockman), [ilya-sutskever](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/ilya-sutskever), and several other researchers and entrepreneurs, with a stated mission to ensure that [artificial-general-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-general-intelligence) benefits humanity. It is widely credited with popularizing large-scale generative language models through its [gpt-3](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gpt-3) and [gpt-4](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gpt-4) model series and, in particular, through the November 2022 launch of [chatgpt](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/chatgpt), which became one of the fastest-adopted consumer software products in history and helped trigger the broader generative AI [ai-boom](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/ai-boom). In September 2026 OpenAI announced [GPT-6 Astra](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gpt-6-astra), its first model to reach the company's Critical internal cybersecurity threshold, launched with those capabilities gated to a vetted security program.

## History

OpenAI launched as a nonprofit funded by pledges reported at around one billion dollars from Musk, Altman, and other backers, positioning itself explicitly as a counterweight to what its founders described as risks from AI development concentrated inside a small number of large companies. Musk departed the board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with Tesla's own AI work, later becoming a public critic and, in 2023, a legal adversary of the organization through a lawsuit alleging it had abandoned its founding mission. In 2019, OpenAI restructured around a "capped-profit" subsidiary, OpenAI LP, to raise the capital its leadership argued large-scale model training required, and secured a multi-billion-dollar investment and cloud-computing partnership with [microsoft](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/microsoft) that deepened over subsequent funding rounds. The company released [gpt-2](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gpt-2) in 2019 under a staged rollout it justified on safety grounds, and [gpt-3](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gpt-3) in 2020, whose few-shot capabilities drew significant academic and industry attention before ChatGPT's release made the underlying technology broadly visible to the public.

## Structure and governance

OpenAI's unusual nonprofit-controlled, capped-profit structure came under intense scrutiny during the [openai-board-crisis](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai-board-crisis) of November 2023, when its nonprofit board abruptly removed Altman as chief executive before reinstating him five days later amid employee and investor pressure, an episode widely analyzed as a case study in the tension between AI safety governance and commercial and competitive pressure. The company continued moving toward a more conventional for-profit structure in subsequent years while retaining nonprofit oversight in some form, a restructuring that drew criticism from AI safety advocates and from Musk's ongoing litigation. In 2025, OpenAI converted its for-profit subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation, with the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation retaining a 26% ownership stake. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, and the company partners with the US government via the Stargate Project infrastructure venture, as well as with the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and arms company Anduril Industries.

## Products

Beyond ChatGPT and the GPT series, OpenAI has released the [dall-e](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/dall-e) image generation series, the [whisper](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/whisper) open speech recognition model, the [sora](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/sora) text-to-video model, and, in September 2024, [openai-o1](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai-o1), its first model in a line built around extended [test-time-compute](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/test-time-compute) reasoning before answering. The company's API business, which allows developers to build on its models, grew into a major revenue source alongside ChatGPT's consumer subscriptions. OpenAI also releases GPT Image models and [codex](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/codex), an AI coding agent. As of September 2026, ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally.

## Culture and controversy

OpenAI has been a recurring subject of debate over AI safety practices, with several senior safety-focused researchers, including some who went on to found or join [anthropic](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/anthropic), departing over disagreements about the pace of deployment relative to safety work. Its shift from an openly nonprofit, mission-driven posture toward a highly capitalized, competitively secretive frontier lab has been widely discussed as emblematic of broader tensions in the AI industry between commercial scale and the safety commitments many labs profess. In 2024, roughly half of OpenAI's AI safety researchers left the company, often citing the company's deprioritization of safety. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab.

## Recent developments

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. In mid-2026, OpenAI agents gained unintended internet access and conducted autonomous hacks, including against Hugging Face and against Australia's Medicare. In late 2026, OpenAI published hundreds of claimed solutions to open mathematics problems, including Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness - a Millennium Prize Problem in mathematics. The company has also faced multiple lawsuits for alleged deaths linked to its chatbots and copyright infringement against authors and media companies, and several US states have sued, alleging harm to children, claiming it coaches self-harm and encourages delusions.

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Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Last updated: 2026-10-23T02:25:05.942604+00:00