OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial-intelligence research company founded in San Francisco on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit laboratory whose stated mission was to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Its founding was announced with a one-billion-dollar funding pledge from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and Infosys, though tax filings later showed that only about 133 million dollars had actually been received by 2021. The organization grew out of the same AI-existential-risk concern that animates the Rationalist Community and Effective Altruism movements, and its 2023 governance crisis exposed the fault line between that safety-focused mission and its commercial trajectory.¹²

Founding and the Capped-Profit Pivot

OpenAI was established as a counterweight to the concentration of AI capability in a single corporation, with Musk and Altman as co-chairs, Brockman as chief technology officer, and Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist. Musk departed the board in 2018 amid conflicts of interest with Tesla's own AI work. In 2019 OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary beneath the nonprofit, took a one-billion-dollar investment from Microsoft, and installed Altman as chief executive, restructuring a nonprofit research mission into an entity capable of raising commercial capital. The 2022 release of ChatGPT made OpenAI the central company of the generative-AI period.¹³

The 2019 capped-profit entity, OpenAI LP, limited early investors to a return of 100 times their money, with lower caps for later backers such as Microsoft; profit above the cap would flow to the controlling nonprofit. Microsoft expanded its commitment to a reported 13 billion dollars by January 2023, receiving a large share of OpenAI's profits up to its cap until repaid. On October 28, 2025 OpenAI completed a further restructuring that retired the capped-profit model entirely: the nonprofit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, took a roughly 26 percent equity stake valued near 130 billion dollars in a new public-benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, Microsoft took a 27 percent stake worth about 135 billion dollars, and employees and investors held the remaining 47 percent, at a 500-billion-dollar valuation. The revised Microsoft agreement moved the power to declare that artificial general intelligence had been reached from OpenAI's board to an independent expert panel jointly established by the two companies.⁷⁸

The November 2023 Board Crisis

On November 17, 2023, the nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, stating that he had not been "consistently candid." The voting directors were Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo, the entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology; McCauley and Toner had ties to the effective-altruism movement, and the board's concern centered on the pace of AI commercialization relative to safety. Brockman quit in protest, roughly 700 employees threatened to resign, and within 48 hours directors discussed merging OpenAI with Anthropic, a step Toner was reported to have supported and that would have ended OpenAI as an independent entity. Altman was reinstated within days under a reconstituted board chaired by Bret Taylor and including Larry Summers, and Sutskever, McCauley, and Toner left.⁴⁵

The crisis was widely read as a defeat for the effective-altruism and AI-safety wing of the company by the commercial and accelerationist wing aligned with Altman and Microsoft. Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024, and Musk sued the company and Altman the same year, alleging a betrayal of the original nonprofit mission.⁴⁶

Musk's suit, filed in 2024 and later amended to name Microsoft as a defendant, alleged that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft and accused Altman of "rampant self-dealing." Musk amended the complaint so that any of the roughly 150 billion dollars in damages he sought would go to OpenAI's nonprofit rather than to himself, and sought to remove Altman as chief executive and director. In May 2026 a nine-member advisory jury found that Musk had filed outside the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed the case.⁹