OpenAI
OpenAI Group PBC is an American artificial intelligence research organization headquartered in San Francisco, operating as a for-profit public benefit corporation partially controlled by a nonprofit foundation.[^c1] Founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and others,[^c2] the organization's founding mission was "to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity."[^c3]
The November 2022 release of ChatGPT is widely regarded as triggering the generative AI boom and widespread public interest in artificial intelligence.[^c4] The company's product portfolio includes the GPT family of large language models (including GPT-5, released in 2025-2026), DALL-E for image generation, and Sora for video generation. Sora was discontinued as a standalone product in April 2026 after OpenAI announced it would shut down the service;[^c17] a reduced video generation capability (5-second clips, no audio) remains available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers.[^c18] By late 2025, ChatGPT had grown to over 800 million weekly active users across finance, healthcare, education, and media.[^c19]
OpenAI has undergone significant structural evolution. Originally a nonprofit, it adopted a capped-profit model in 2019 with a 100-times return limit on investments.[^c6] In October 2025, the organization converted to a public benefit corporation (PBC),[^c7] with the OpenAI Foundation holding 26% equity, Microsoft holding 27%, and employees and other investors holding 47%.[^c8] Under the restructuring, OpenAI committed to purchasing $250 billion in Azure cloud services from Microsoft, while Microsoft's intellectual property rights were extended through 2032 but excluded OpenAI's consumer hardware.[^c21][^c22] In April 2026, the partnership was amended again: Microsoft's license to OpenAI's models became non-exclusive (while remaining in effect through 2032), and Microsoft's obligation to pay OpenAI a revenue share was eliminated, while OpenAI continued paying Microsoft through 2030.[^c28][^c29] The renegotiation capped OpenAI's revenue-sharing payments to Microsoft at $38 billion through 2030, down from a potential $135 billion under the original arrangement.[^c32] The company raised $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion valuation by April 2026.[^c9] A $100 billion investment and data-center partnership with Nvidia announced in September 2025 was ultimately abandoned; Nvidia finalized a $30 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and CEO Jensen Huang cited the company's plans for an initial public offering as the reason the larger deal could not proceed.[^c31] Annualized revenue reached approximately $20 billion in 2025, though the company continued to operate at a significant loss, with HSBC projecting losses of $23.5 billion in 2025 and potentially $60 billion by 2027;[^c20] a 2026 estimate projected a $14 billion loss for that year.[^c23]
At its Dev Day 2025, OpenAI announced the Sora 2 API, the GPT-5 Pro model for enterprise use, a smaller voice model called GPT-Realtime Mini, and an agent-building platform.[^c24] The company's late-2025 pivot toward enterprise and agent-oriented computing reflected a recognition that "infrastructure, not algorithms alone, became the primary bottleneck" in AI development,[^c25] with CEO Sam Altman articulating a goal of "a world of abundant and cheap AI."[^c26] GPT-5.5, the company's first full model retraining since GPT-4.5, was released in April 2026 and positioned as an "agent runtime" for enterprise automation. In May 2026, OpenAI launched the [[OpenAI Deployment Company|OpenAI Deployment Company (DeployCo)]], a majority-owned subsidiary with over $4 billion in initial funding to help businesses build and deploy AI systems within their operations.[^c27] That same month, the company restructured its product organization, merging ChatGPT, Codex, and the developer API into a single division under co-founder [[Greg Brockman]], who became permanent head of product strategy with a mandate to consolidate efforts toward the agentic future.[^c34]
In May 2026, OpenAI began preparing potential legal action against Apple over the ChatGPT-Siri integration partnership, alleging that Apple had not fulfilled its contractual obligations after the arrangement failed to generate the billions of dollars in annual subscription revenue that OpenAI had expected. The dispute coincided with Apple testing competing AI models from Anthropic and Google for a next-generation Siri, and broader tensions between the companies included OpenAI's recruitment of Apple engineers for hardware efforts led by Jony Ive.[^c30]
The organization has been marked by several major controversies. In November 2023, the board removed CEO Sam Altman, reinstating him five days later after nearly all employees threatened to resign.[^c12] The Superalignment safety team was dissolved in May 2024 after its co-leaders resigned, with departing researcher Jan Leike stating that "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products."[^c13] By late 2024, only one of the four senior executives from a March 2023 photo remained at the company.[^c14] Elon Musk filed a lawsuit in 2026 alleging that OpenAI had abandoned its founding mission.[^c16] The case concluded in May 2026 when a federal jury returned a unanimous verdict for OpenAI and Altman, finding that Musk's claims exceeded the statute of limitations.[^c33] The company has also pursued a massive infrastructure expansion through the Stargate Project, a $500 billion initiative in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank.[^c15]
By May 2026, OpenAI faced intensifying competitive pressure from [[Anthropic]], which had overtaken it in enterprise AI spending with more than 65 percent of the enterprise market.[^c35]