OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence research and deployment organization. It consists of the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC, a Delaware public benefit corporation that the foundation controls through special voting rights. OpenAI develops large language models, multimodal systems, consumer applications, and developer services. Its best-known products include ChatGPT, the GPT model family, the Codex coding agent, and the OpenAI API.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit in December 2015. Its founding announcement named Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, Greg Brockman as chief technology officer, Ilya Sutskever as research director, and a group of founding researchers. It also listed donors and corporate supporters that had committed a combined $1 billion, while noting that only a small fraction of that amount was expected to be spent in the first years.^[1] The organization later created a controlled for-profit subsidiary to raise the capital required for increasingly compute-intensive research, and in October 2025 completed a recapitalization that converted that subsidiary into a public benefit corporation.^[3][4]

OpenAI's charter defines its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence, which it describes as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work, benefits all of humanity. The charter also commits the organization to long-term safety, technical leadership, and cooperation with other research and policy institutions.^[2] These are OpenAI's stated principles, not an independent finding that every corporate or product decision satisfies them.

By 2026 OpenAI had become one of the largest privately held companies in the world by paper valuation. It closed a financing round on March 31, 2026 with $122 billion of committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation.^[38][62] It said in February 2026 that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users,^[61] and on July 31, 2026 that its models reached "more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses."^[81] It also carried compute purchase obligations that press reporting placed in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and on June 8, 2026 it disclosed that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for a possible initial public offering.^[54][82]

Organization and governance

Nonprofit origins and the capped-profit partnership

OpenAI was incorporated as a nonprofit in Delaware in December 2015 and announced publicly on December 11 of that year. The announcement listed Musk, Altman, Brockman, Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba among the founding team, and named Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research among the backers who had together committed $1 billion.^[1]

In March 2019 OpenAI formed OpenAI LP, a "capped-profit" limited partnership whose general partner was the nonprofit, legally named OpenAI Inc. Investors and employees could receive returns only up to a cap negotiated in advance per limited partner; OpenAI said the first round's cap was 100 times the investment and that it expected the multiple to fall in later rounds. Everything above the caps was to be owned by the nonprofit. Every investor and employee signed an agreement that the partnership's obligation to the charter came first, "even at the expense of some or all of their financial stake," and only directors without a financial stake could vote where investor returns and the mission conflicted.^[3] The structure became a recurring subject of legal and journalistic scrutiny, and it is the arrangement that Musk's later litigation attacked.

The 2025 recapitalization

OpenAI proposed a further change on December 27, 2024, under which the for-profit would become a Delaware public benefit corporation with ordinary stock and the nonprofit would hold shares rather than control. That plan drew objections from the attorneys general of California and Delaware, from Musk's litigation, and from charity-law advocates. On May 5, 2025 OpenAI abandoned it: the for-profit would still become a public benefit corporation, but the nonprofit would keep control, and the capped-profit structure would be replaced by "a normal capital structure where everyone has stock."^[162][163]

The recapitalization completed on October 28, 2025. The nonprofit was renamed the OpenAI Foundation, and the operating company became OpenAI Group PBC, incorporated in Delaware that morning. Its certificate of incorporation names the public benefit as ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, and requires directors to consider only that mission, and not the pecuniary interests of stockholders, on safety and security questions. Control runs through a single share of Class N common stock held by the foundation, which carries no economic rights but at least 66.67 percent of the voting power, must be present for a quorum on director elections, and strips Class A holders of any vote on directors while it is outstanding.^[4][164]

At the recapitalization's close, OpenAI said the foundation held 26 percent of OpenAI Group, an equity position it valued at approximately $130 billion, plus a warrant paying out additional shares if the share price rises more than tenfold after fifteen years.^[4][59] Microsoft separately described its own holding as worth approximately $135 billion, or roughly 27 percent on an as-converted diluted basis inclusive of all owners; press reporting put employees and other investors at the remaining 47 percent.^[60] Those percentages are measured on different bases and are not a like-for-like ranking. They are also the October 2025 baseline: OpenAI has not published an updated split after the March 2026 financing, although by February 2026 it valued the foundation's stake at more than $180 billion.^[61]

The foundation announced an initial $25 billion commitment across two areas at the time of the recapitalization: accelerating health and disease research, including open-sourced health datasets and funding for scientists, and what OpenAI calls "AI resilience," meaning technical work on reducing the risks of the systems it builds.^[59]

The California attorney general signed a memorandum of understanding on October 27, 2025 setting conditions for non-objection, and the Delaware attorney general issued a statement of no objection the following day.^[5][165] The California document is specific: OpenAI must keep both entities headquartered in California; the foundation alone appoints and removes OpenAI Group directors; the Safety and Security Committee is a committee of the foundation rather than the company, with authority to require mitigation measures "up to and including halting the release of models or AI systems" even where risk thresholds would otherwise permit release; Zico Kolter chairs that committee, sits only on the foundation board, and holds observation rights at every company board meeting; a second foundation-only director must be seated within a year; the company board must have a majority of independent directors and publish public reports at least annually; and the attorney general gets 21 days' notice before any change of control, mission change, or headquarters relocation. Neither office certified that the reorganization would fulfill OpenAI's mission in practice, and both retained oversight.^[5] Advocacy organizations including Public Citizen argued during the review that the nonprofit's stake was set too low relative to the assets it was giving up and that the nonprofit had functioned as a rubber stamp for the for-profit since 2023.^[63] OpenAI has disputed that characterization.

The OpenAI Foundation as a grantmaker

The foundation's first grantmaking program was the People-First AI Fund, a $50 million pool for United States nonprofits announced in 2025. Nearly 3,000 organizations applied, and the first wave awarded $40.5 million to 208 community organizations, with the balance following in a second wave.^[64][65] In March 2026 the foundation said it would grant roughly $1 billion over the following year and build out a professional philanthropic staff, and committed a further $50 million to a 2026 round of the People-First AI Fund.^[65][66] The scale of the endowment relative to its grantmaking rate is a standing criticism: a stake nominally worth well over $100 billion was, in its first full year, distributing sums in the tens of millions.^[66]

Boards

Directors of the OpenAI Foundation also serve on the OpenAI Group PBC board, with one exception noted below. As of August 2026 the foundation board comprised Bret Taylor as chair, Adam D'Angelo, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Zico Kolter, retired US Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Adebayo Ogunlesi, Nicole Seligman, Altman, David Velez, and Robin Vince. Kolter, who chairs the Safety and Security Committee, sits on the OpenAI Group board as a non-voting observer so that his safety oversight role stays at the foundation level.^[4]

D'Angelo, who joined in 2018, is the only director who predates the November 2023 crisis. Taylor became chair in November 2023; Desmond-Hellmann, Seligman, and Altman himself joined on March 8, 2024, the day the WilmerHale review concluded, and Kolter, Nakasone, and Ogunlesi followed later that year.^[67] Larry Summers, who had joined with Taylor in November 2023, resigned on November 19, 2025 after the House Oversight Committee released correspondence between him and Jeffrey Epstein. Velez, the founder of the Latin American bank Nubank, and Vince, the chairman and chief executive of BNY, joined both boards on July 21, 2026. OpenAI described them as leaders who had "used technology to reshape financial services," a framing that press coverage read as preparation for public markets.^[6][68] Microsoft took a non-voting observer seat in November 2023 and relinquished it in July 2024 amid antitrust scrutiny; despite its roughly 27 percent stake it holds no board seat. Board membership is a mutable fact, so this list is date-specific.

The November 2023 leadership crisis

On November 17, 2023, the nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, saying that he had not been "consistently candid" in his communications with the board. It also removed Brockman as board chair, although he initially remained an employee.^[24] Chief technology officer Mira Murati served briefly as interim chief executive, followed by former Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear. Four days after the removal, OpenAI said it had reached an agreement in principle for Altman to return under a new initial board of Bret Taylor as chair, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo; the arrangement was formalized on November 29, when Murati also returned as chief technology officer.^[25] Reuters reported that nearly all of the company's more than 700 employees had signed a letter threatening to leave unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman.^[26] Microsoft, then OpenAI's largest investor, publicly offered to hire Altman and any departing staff, which sharpened the pressure on the board.

The new initial board of Taylor, Summers, and D'Angelo retained the law firm WilmerHale to review the events, working through more than 30,000 documents and dozens of interviews. In March 2024, OpenAI published a summary stating that WilmerHale found "a breakdown in trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman," that the removal "did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI's finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners," and that "the prior Board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal." The summary also faulted the prior board for acting on an abridged timeframe without notice to stakeholders.^[27] The complete review was not released, and WilmerHale had been engaged by the company, so the published summary is not equivalent to a public independent inquiry.

Two of the directors who voted to remove Altman, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, argued in a May 2024 essay that "self-governance cannot reliably withstand the pressure of profit incentives."^[166] In a podcast interview that month Toner said the board had learned about ChatGPT's launch on Twitter, that Altman had not disclosed his ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund, and that two executives had described their experiences with him using the phrase "psychological abuse." Toner did not name those executives, and press identifications of them are inference rather than her testimony. Taylor and Summers published a rebuttal defending the company's safety record.^[166]

Leadership and executive turnover

Altman has been chief executive since 2019, except for the five days in November 2023. Brockman is president. Sarah Friar became chief financial officer in August 2024, Jakub Pachocki became chief scientist in May 2024, Mark Chen became chief research officer in March 2025, Jason Kwon is chief strategy officer, and Denise Dresser, formerly chief executive of Slack, became chief revenue officer in December 2025. OpenAI has had no chief technology officer since 2024.

Senior turnover has been persistent, and 2026 was the sharpest year of it. Sutskever, Karpathy, Bob McGrew, Murati, Schulman, Jan Leike, Barret Zoph, Lilian Weng, Miles Brundage, and Alec Radford, the lead author of the original GPT paper, all left between 2022 and 2025, several to found or join competing labs including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, and Thinking Machines Lab.

The 2026 exits reshaped the executive layer rather than replacing it. Caitlin Kalinowski, who led hardware and robotics, resigned in March 2026 over a Department of Defense agreement, writing that "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got."^[167] On April 3, Brad Lightcap moved from chief operating officer to a special-projects role reporting to Altman, Fidji Simo went on medical leave from the chief-executive-of-Applications job she had taken in 2025, and chief marketing officer Kate Rouch stepped down; Simo formally moved to a part-time advisory role on July 9, and OpenAI did not refill the position.^[168] On April 17, Kevin Weil, who had moved from chief product officer to lead OpenAI for Science, Bill Peebles, who ran the Sora video team, and Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer for enterprise applications, announced their departures on the same day, alongside the Sora shutdown and the dissolution of the science group.^[69][70] In July, a reorganization merged the safety and research organizations under a new vice president of research and safety, Mia Glaese, and the head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, told staff he was leaving.^[169] Weng returned to OpenAI at the end of July 2026 to lead an internal research team working on recursive self-improvement.^[170]

The net effect, as CNBC described it, was a consolidation of authority in Brockman, who by mid-2026 ran the ChatGPT product business, go-to-market, enterprise, and compute, with Friar and Kwon as the other two direct reports to Altman.^[171] The 2026 departures are covered in more detail at OpenAI 2026 executive departures.

History

Early research, 2015-2019

OpenAI's first years emphasized research infrastructure and reinforcement learning. It released OpenAI Gym in April 2016 as a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement-learning algorithms.^[7] Universe followed in December 2016 as a platform that exposed games, websites, and desktop programs as environments in which agents could act through screen pixels, a virtual keyboard, and a mouse.^[8] OpenAI Baselines, a set of reference implementations of reinforcement-learning algorithms, began appearing in May 2017, and the teaching resource Spinning Up in Deep RL followed in November 2018. OpenAI Microscope, a browser-based collection of visualizations of the neurons and features inside well-studied vision networks, appeared in April 2020 as part of the company's interpretability work.

Research projects tested learning in simulated and physical environments. Dactyl, announced in July 2018, used a robotic hand to reorient objects after training in simulation with randomized physical conditions.^[9] OpenAI Five used large-scale self-play to learn the multiplayer game Dota 2. In April 2019 it defeated the reigning world champion team OG in two demonstration matches played under a restricted hero pool and other specified game conditions.^[10]

Musk left the nonprofit board in February 2018. OpenAI's announcement at the time said the departure would avoid a potential future conflict as Tesla increased its focus on AI.^[11] Later public accounts by Musk and OpenAI disputed the circumstances and meaning of his departure, and those disputes eventually reached a courtroom. Claims about the private negotiations of that period should be attributed to the party making them rather than presented as settled history.

OpenAI also moved toward large-scale language modeling. Its 2018 GPT-1 paper showed that generative pretraining on unlabeled text followed by task-specific fine-tuning could improve performance across several language-understanding tasks.^[12] In February 2019 it announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter model. OpenAI initially withheld the full model and used a staged release because of concerns about possible misuse, then released the complete model later that year after observing the effects of smaller releases.^[13] The staged release drew criticism from researchers who considered it either an overreaction or a publicity exercise, and it set the template for arguments about release policy that OpenAI has had ever since.

Commercial expansion, 2019-2022

The creation of OpenAI LP in 2019 marked a change in financing, but not in formal control: the nonprofit remained the governing entity.^[3] In July 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion and became OpenAI's preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies. The companies also agreed to build Azure-based supercomputing infrastructure.^[14]

GPT-3, described in a May 2020 paper, scaled the autoregressive transformer approach to 175 billion parameters and showed that a single pretrained model could perform many tasks from instructions or examples in its context without additional gradient updates.^[15] OpenAI launched a private beta of its API in June 2020, initially giving developers access to GPT-3 through a hosted service rather than releasing the model weights.^[16] That decision, more than any single model, defined OpenAI's commercial posture for the next five years.

Research during 2021 and 2022 broadened beyond text generation. CLIP learned visual concepts from natural-language supervision and supported zero-shot transfer to image-classification tasks.^[17] DALL-E connected text prompts to image generation, and the DALL-E 2 research system used CLIP representations and diffusion-based decoding to produce higher-resolution images.^[18] A 2021 paper introduced Codex, a GPT descendant fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub; versions of the system powered early GitHub Copilot.^[19] OpenAI released Whisper model weights and code on September 21, 2022 after training the speech-recognition system on a large multilingual and multitask audio dataset.^[20][58] The company also published Triton, a Python-embedded language for writing GPU kernels, in July 2021, and later the tiktoken tokenizer library.^[83]

OpenAI's work on instruction following combined supervised demonstrations with preference comparisons and reinforcement learning from human feedback. The InstructGPT study found that human evaluators preferred outputs from a 1.3-billion-parameter instruction-tuned model to those from the much larger base GPT-3 model on the study's prompt distribution. The result concerned evaluator preference and did not show that the smaller model was generally more capable.^[21]

ChatGPT launched as a free research preview on November 30, 2022. The initial system used a model from the GPT-3.5 series and was fine-tuned through supervised learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback.^[22] The conversational interface packaged OpenAI's language models as a general consumer service, and its adoption curve reset expectations across the industry.

GPT-4 and the product build-out, 2023-2024

Microsoft announced a further multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in January 2023. At that time, Azure was OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider and Microsoft had rights to deploy OpenAI models across its products and Azure services.^[23] OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. The model accepted image and text inputs and generated text, but OpenAI did not disclose its parameter count, training compute, model architecture, dataset construction, or hardware configuration. Numbers about GPT-4's size that circulate without a verifiable source are estimates, not specifications.^[28]

The rest of 2023 was spent turning ChatGPT into a platform. ChatGPT plugins began rolling out on March 23, 2023, letting the assistant call third-party services.^[73] At its first DevDay on November 6, 2023, OpenAI announced GPT-4 Turbo, the Assistants API, and custom GPTs with a planned marketplace, and Altman said ChatGPT had reached 100 million weekly active users.^[71][72] The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024, later than promised, and OpenAI said users had already created more than 3 million custom GPTs.

2024 brought multimodality and the first reasoning models. GPT-4o, released in May 2024, was designed to accept combinations of text, audio, image, and video as input and generate text, audio, and image output within one model rather than routing every modality through separate systems.^[29] OpenAI introduced the o1 preview in September 2024 as a model trained to spend additional computation on reasoning before answering.^[30] It launched ChatGPT Search on October 31, 2024 after a July prototype,^[74] and released Sora as a video-generation product on December 9.^[31] The same year, departures from OpenAI's safety teams prompted questions about the balance between product development and long-term risk research, discussed below.

Agents, reasoning, and scale, 2025

2025 was the year OpenAI committed to agents. Operator, a browser-controlling agent built on a Computer-Using Agent model, arrived on January 23 as a research preview for Pro subscribers; deep research, an agent that compiles cited reports over tens of minutes, followed on February 2.^[75][76] The Responses API and the Agents SDK replaced the Assistants API as the recommended way to build agents in March.^[40] ChatGPT agent, announced July 17, merged Operator's browsing with deep research's analysis inside ChatGPT, and Operator itself was retired on August 31.^[77]

GPT-5 became available on August 7, 2025 as a routed system combining a fast general model with a more compute-intensive reasoning mode.^[33] Two days earlier OpenAI had released the gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b model weights under the Apache 2.0 license, its first open-weight language-model release since GPT-2.^[34] "Open weight" is the precise term, because publishing weights and inference code does not disclose the training dataset or the development process.

The second half of the year was dominated by infrastructure and consumer launches. At DevDay on October 6 OpenAI shipped apps inside ChatGPT with the Apps SDK, the AgentKit tooling suite, and general availability for Codex; Altman said ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users.^[41] The Sora app, a short-video social product built on Sora 2, launched on September 30. ChatGPT Atlas, a Chromium-based browser with ChatGPT built in, arrived on October 21. ChatGPT Pulse, a proactive daily briefing, launched in preview on September 25.^[78] Behind all of it sat the Stargate Project, announced in January, and a run of compute agreements with NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Amazon between September and November.

Consolidation, 2026

2026 reversed direction. OpenAI kept shipping frontier models at roughly six-week intervals, but it also closed or absorbed several of the consumer products it had launched the year before, and it reoriented around enterprise revenue ahead of a possible listing.

The additions were substantial. Advertising arrived in ChatGPT on February 9, 2026 for United States users on the Free and Go tiers.^[84][85] OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise platform for building and governing agents, launched on February 5.^[86] The company announced a $110 billion investment round on February 27 and closed it at $122 billion and an $852 billion valuation on March 31.^[61][62] It launched the OpenAI Deployment Company, a majority-owned services venture with more than $4 billion of outside capital, on May 11.^[87] GPT-Rosalind, a life-sciences reasoning model, shipped on April 16.^[88] On July 9 OpenAI released GPT-5.6 alongside ChatGPT Work, a long-running agent for document and spreadsheet output, and a unified desktop application.^[35][80] OpenAI Presence, a managed platform for customer-facing voice and chat agents, followed on July 22, and consumer health features rolled out across the United States on July 23.^[89][90]

The subtractions were equally telling. OpenAI announced the end of Sora on March 24 and shut the consumer app on April 26, keeping the API alive until September 24, 2026.^[32] Pulse was folded into scheduled tasks in June. Group chats were retired on July 9. Atlas was deprecated the same day, with its agentic browsing capabilities moved into ChatGPT and Codex and the standalone browser scheduled to stop working on August 9, 2026.^[79][80] Agent Builder and the hosted Evals platform, two of the three components announced with AgentKit in October 2025, were marked for retirement on November 30, 2026, leaving ChatKit as the survivor.^[91] The OpenAI for Science group was decentralized in April, and the Prism research workspace it had launched in January was wound down with it.^[69]

Models

The GPT series

The GPT family consists of generative pre-trained transformer models. In broad terms, they predict tokens from context after pretraining on large text or multimodal corpora, then undergo post-training intended to improve instruction following, usefulness, and safety. The public record does not support a single unbroken specification table for the whole family, because OpenAI stopped disclosing architecture and training details with GPT-4 and has not resumed.^[28]

Naming has been inconsistent enough to confuse the record. OpenAI skipped "o2," used "GPT-4.5" for a large non-reasoning model and "GPT-4.1" for a later, smaller family, published no standalone GPT-5.3 flagship (the number was used only for Codex variants and a chat model), and in July 2026 replaced numeric size suffixes with the named tiers Sol, Terra, and Luna.^{[35][96][100]}

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OpenAI has retired models about as quickly as it has shipped them. GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o4-mini, and the original GPT-5 chat models were retired on February 13, 2026; GPT-5.1 followed on March 11; and o3 and the GPT-5 API snapshots were scheduled to shut down later in 2026.^[80][91] Developers who wrote against a pinned snapshot have had roughly a year of notice at best.

As of August 1, 2026 the frontier release is GPT-5.6, sold in three tiers. After a price cut on July 30, 2026 that reduced Luna by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent, OpenAI listed Sol at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, Terra at $2 and $12, and Luna at $0.20 and $1.20.^[104] OpenAI reported a score of 53.6 on Agents' Last Exam and 92.2 percent on BrowseComp for the Sol tier.^[35] Vendor benchmark results in a launch announcement are useful for locating a product against its predecessors; they do not by themselves establish independent comparative superiority.

Reasoning models

The o-series and the reasoning modes in later GPT systems allocate additional inference computation before returning an answer. OpenAI introduced the approach in September 2024 with o1-preview, describing models trained by large-scale reinforcement learning to produce an internal chain of thought.^[30][95] The company does not show that chain of thought verbatim to users, a decision it justified on safety and competitive grounds and which researchers have criticized as removing the main audit surface a reasoning model offers.

The separate o-series brand ended with o3 and o4-mini. From GPT-5 onward the reasoning capability was folded into the main line as a mode with selectable effort levels, and by GPT-5.6 those levels ran through max and ultra, the latter spawning subagents.^[33][103] Extra inference compute can improve performance on multi-step tasks, but it does not guarantee correctness. OpenAI's own system documentation continues to acknowledge hallucinations and calibration problems.^[28]

Open-weight releases

OpenAI released gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b on August 5, 2025 under the Apache 2.0 license, its first open-weight language models since GPT-2. Both are mixture-of-experts models, with 117 billion total and 5.1 billion active parameters for the larger and 21 billion total and 3.6 billion active for the smaller, and both are distributed through Hugging Face rather than the OpenAI API.^[34] They use a structured conversation format called OpenAI Harmony, published with an open-source renderer, and OpenAI's documentation states that the models will not work correctly without it. On October 29, 2025 OpenAI added gpt-oss-safeguard-120b and gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, open-weight classifier models that take a safety policy at inference time rather than baking one in during training.^[105]

"Open weight" is the precise term for all of these. Publishing weights and inference code does not disclose the training dataset, the data-filtering decisions, or the development process, and OpenAI has published none of those.

Image generation

DALL-E and CLIP were announced on the same day in January 2021. DALL-E 2 followed in April 2022 and DALL-E 3 in September 2023, the latter integrated into ChatGPT rather than sold as a separate service. The architecture changed in 2025: OpenAI moved image generation into the main multimodal model, shipping native image generation in ChatGPT on March 25, 2025 and the gpt-image-1 API model on April 23. GPT Image 1.5 arrived in December 2025 and GPT Image 2, marketed as ChatGPT Images 2.0, on April 21, 2026. GPT Image 2 was the first OpenAI image model to run a reasoning pass before generating, planning layout and text placement, and it can return up to eight images from one prompt.^[106] The older DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3 API endpoints were retired on May 12, 2026.^[91]

Between them these systems also produced OpenAI's most persistent controversies about training data and style imitation, and they are among the works at issue in the artists' and publishers' copyright suits described below.

Video

OpenAI announced Sora on February 15, 2024 with a technical report framing video models as "world simulators."^[107] The product launched on December 9, 2024, and Sora 2, released September 30, 2025, added synchronized audio, better physical consistency, and a likeness-insertion feature called Cameos.^[31] A standalone Sora app launched on iOS the same day in the United States and Canada behind invite codes, reached the top of the US App Store within five days, and came to Android on November 4, 2025.^[124]

OpenAI announced the product's end on March 24, 2026, discontinued the Sora web and mobile experiences on April 26, 2026, and set the Sora API to shut down on September 24, 2026.^[32][91] OpenAI's help-center notice gives no reason. Press coverage attributed the closure to serving costs far in excess of revenue and to unresolved rights disputes over depicted characters and real people; those explanations are reported, not confirmed by the company. The Sora team's lead, Bill Peebles, left OpenAI in the same week as the app shutdown.^[69]

Speech, voice, and audio

Whisper, released on September 21, 2022, remains the clearest case of OpenAI publishing weights: the speech-recognition and translation models and their inference code were released under an MIT license.^[20][58] Voice Engine, a voice-cloning model previewed on March 29, 2024, went the other way and was never broadly released, with OpenAI citing synthetic-voice misuse risks in an election year.

Real-time speech became a product line in its own right. Advanced Voice Mode, built on GPT-4o's native audio, entered alpha in July 2024 and reached general availability that September. The Realtime API opened in beta on October 1, 2024 and reached general availability with the gpt-realtime model on August 28, 2025, adding remote Model Context Protocol servers, image input, and SIP telephony.^[110] On May 7, 2026 OpenAI shipped gpt-realtime-2 along with dedicated live-translation and streaming-transcription models.^[109] GPT-Live, released July 8, 2026, replaced Advanced Voice Mode with a full-duplex architecture that listens and speaks at the same time, delegating harder questions to a background frontier model; GPT-Live-1 serves paid tiers and GPT-Live-1 mini serves the free tier.^[108] GPT-Transcribe and GPT-Live-Transcribe, added on July 28, 2026, became the recommended speech-to-text models and pushed the Whisper line into legacy status.^[97]

Other models and research artifacts

MuseNet (2019) and Jukebox (2020) generated music; GLIDE (2021), Point-E (2022), and Shap-E (2023) covered guided image and 3D generation; Consistency Models (2023) explored single-step generation. On the utility side, the text-embedding-3 family launched on January 25, 2024 with a parameter for shortening embedding vectors, and the moderation API moved to a multimodal GPT-4o-based classifier in September 2024. GPT-Red, announced July 15, 2026, is an adversarial red-teaming model that OpenAI says it keeps internal by design rather than releasing.^[112]

Products and platform

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an application and service layer, not one fixed model. The models available inside it have changed continuously, and access depends on plan, region, product surface, and date. Model menus and prices are therefore better treated as product documentation than as durable encyclopedia facts.

Reported and company-stated usage figures form a steep curve. OpenAI said ChatGPT had 100 million weekly active users at DevDay in November 2023 and 800 million at DevDay in October 2025.^[71][41] On February 27, 2026 the company said ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users, more than 50 million consumer subscribers, more than 9 million paying business users, and 1.6 million weekly Codex users.^[61] On July 31, 2026 it said its models reached "more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses," a formulation that spans all products rather than ChatGPT's weekly actives.^[81] All of these are company-reported and unaudited.

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Agents and features inside ChatGPT

The assistant accreted features faster than it kept them. Plugins opened in March 2023 and were sunset in April 2024. Advanced Data Analysis, better known as Code Interpreter, gave ChatGPT a sandboxed Python runtime. Canvas added a side-by-side editing surface in October 2024. ChatGPT Search shipped on October 31, 2024 after a July prototype.^[74] Memory, projects, and scheduled tasks accumulated through 2025.

The agent line ran from Operator (January 23, 2025) and deep research (February 2, 2025) to ChatGPT agent (July 17, 2025), which absorbed both.^[75][76][77] ChatGPT Pulse, a proactive overnight briefing, launched in preview on September 25, 2025 and was folded into scheduled tasks in June 2026.^[78][80] ChatGPT Atlas, a Chromium browser with ChatGPT and an agent mode built in, shipped on October 21, 2025 and was deprecated on July 9, 2026, with a shutdown set for August 9, 2026 and its capabilities moved into ChatGPT and Codex.^[79]

The July 9, 2026 release reorganized the consumer product around long-running work. ChatGPT Work runs for hours and returns finished documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, and small web applications, drawing on more than a thousand connectable applications; ChatGPT Sites publishes generated pages; Skills became generally available for Enterprise and Edu; and a single desktop application replaced the separate chat and Codex apps.^[117][80] Group chats were retired the same day.

Advertising

OpenAI published an advertising policy in January 2026 and began testing ads in ChatGPT for United States users on the Free and Go tiers on February 9, 2026, expanding to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by late March and the United Kingdom in June.^[84][85] Paid consumer and business tiers do not show ads, and OpenAI says ads are not shown to minors. The company states that "ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you" and that ad selection draws on the topic of the current conversation, past chats, and prior ad interactions.^[84] That combination, contextual targeting inside a conversational assistant that also holds a memory of the user, is the substance of the privacy objections raised against the product.

The developer platform

The OpenAI API began as a private beta in June 2020 and by December 2025 served more than a million organizations.^[16] Its interface has been rebuilt twice. The Assistants API arrived at DevDay 2023; the Responses API replaced it on March 11, 2025 as a single surface for generating responses and invoking built-in tools such as web search, file search, and computer use, shipped alongside the Agents SDK.^[40] The Assistants API was formally deprecated on August 20, 2025 with a shutdown date of August 26, 2026.^[91] Other endpoints include the Batch API (April 2024, half price for jobs returned within 24 hours), the Realtime API, fine-tuning, embeddings, and the free moderation endpoint.

AgentKit, announced at DevDay on October 6, 2025, bundled a visual Agent Builder, the ChatKit embeddable chat interface, and a hosted evaluations platform. Eight months later, on June 3, 2026, OpenAI deprecated Agent Builder, the Evals platform, and reusable prompts, all with a November 30, 2026 shutdown, leaving ChatKit as the surviving component.^[91] The reversal is one of the clearer examples of how quickly OpenAI's platform commitments have moved.

Codex

"Codex" has named two different things. The 2021 Codex model was a GPT-3 descendant fine-tuned for program synthesis; it introduced the HumanEval benchmark, powered early GitHub Copilot, and was withdrawn from the API in March 2023 with three days' notice.^[19][91]

The name returned in 2025 for an agentic software-engineering system. The Codex CLI, a terminal coding agent, shipped on April 16, 2025; a cloud research preview followed in May; and the product reached general availability at DevDay on October 6, 2025 with GPT-5-Codex behind it, a software-development kit, and Slack integration.^[41] Native desktop applications followed on macOS in February 2026 and Windows in March 2026, and Codex Cloud reached general availability on all plans in June 2026.^[80] OpenAI reported 1.6 million weekly Codex users in February 2026 and said in July 2026 that agentic work through Codex accounted for 99.8 percent of its own weekly output tokens, a figure about internal usage rather than customer behavior.^[61][81]

Two 2026 acquisitions fed the same team. Astral, the maker of the Rust-based Python tools uv, Ruff, and ty, agreed to be acquired on March 19, 2026 for undisclosed terms, with the team joining Codex and the tools remaining open source.^[150] Ona, a company that runs persistent cloud development environments used by about 2 million developers, was announced as an acquisition on June 11, 2026, also for undisclosed terms.^[123] The security agent Aardvark, launched in private beta on October 30, 2025, was rebranded Codex Security on March 6, 2026 and rolled into ChatGPT Enterprise, Business, and Edu.^[118]

Custom GPTs, the GPT Store, and Apps

OpenAI announced custom GPTs on November 6, 2023 as no-code configurations of ChatGPT combining instructions, uploaded files, built-in tools, and API actions.^[72] The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024, two months later than promised, with OpenAI saying more than 3 million GPTs had been created. A promised revenue-sharing program for builders was announced but never became a broad marketplace payout system.

The successor design is the Apps SDK, announced at DevDay on October 6, 2025. It lets developers build applications that run inside a ChatGPT conversation, is built on the Model Context Protocol rather than a proprietary plugin format, and was paired with the Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Stripe, for in-conversation purchases. A Plugin Directory replaced the earlier app directory in July 2026.^[80]

Enterprise and vertical products

OpenAI Frontier, launched February 5, 2026, is an enterprise platform for building, deploying, and governing agents as though they were staff: each agent gets an identity, scoped permissions, operating boundaries, and continuous evaluation, and the platform can manage agents built outside OpenAI. Launch customers included HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Uber.^[86] OpenAI Presence, announced July 22, 2026, is narrower: a managed service for production voice and chat agents in support, billing, and internal IT, delivered through OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers rather than sold self-serve. OpenAI said its own support channel running on Presence resolved 75 percent of inbound issues without human help.^[89]

The OpenAI Deployment Company, launched May 11, 2026, is a majority-owned services venture capitalized with more than $4 billion from OpenAI and 19 outside investors led by TPG, with Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-leads. It embeds forward-deployed engineers inside customer organizations and began by acquiring the applied-AI consultancy Tomoro and its roughly 150 engineers.^[87] OpenAI also launched a partner network in June 2026 and reseller arrangements that let customers draw on existing Oracle and AWS cloud commitments to buy OpenAI models.^[151]

Vertical products cluster in health, science, and government. OpenAI for Healthcare and an enterprise ChatGPT for Healthcare launched January 8, 2026 with health-system customers including Cedars-Sinai, HCA, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and UCSF; ChatGPT for Clinicians, free for verified US clinicians, followed on April 22.^[119] Health in ChatGPT, the consumer feature, began a United States rollout on July 23, 2026, connecting Apple Health and supported medical records; OpenAI said more than 300 million people a week already brought health questions to ChatGPT.^[90] OpenAI for Science, announced September 3, 2025 under Kevin Weil, produced the Prism paper-writing workspace in January 2026 and GPT-Rosalind in April, then was decentralized into other research groups when Weil left that same month.^[69][120]

In government, ChatGPT Gov launched January 28, 2025, an OpenAI for Government umbrella followed in June 2025, and in August 2025 the US General Services Administration made ChatGPT Enterprise available to the federal executive branch for $1 per agency for a year.^[122] OpenAI for Countries, announced May 7, 2025, offers to help allied governments build sovereign AI capacity using American technology, with the United Arab Emirates as the first partner.^[121]

Hardware

OpenAI acquired io Products, the device startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and Altman, in an all-stock transaction valued at just under $6.5 billion; the deal was announced May 21, 2025 and closed July 9, 2025, making it OpenAI's largest acquisition. OpenAI already held about 23 percent of io, so the incremental consideration was roughly $5 billion. Ive's design firm LoveFrom remained independent while Ive took on creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI.^[185] Executives said in November 2025 that first prototypes existed and that a device would be revealed within two years.^[187] No device had shipped as of August 2026, and published descriptions of a screenless, voice-first product come from press reporting rather than from OpenAI. The io acquisition is covered at OpenAI acquisition of io.

Infrastructure and compute

Microsoft

Microsoft has been OpenAI's largest single commercial relationship since 2019, and its terms have been renegotiated four times. The July 2019 agreement paired a $1 billion investment with joint Azure supercomputing work and made Azure the exclusive cloud.^[14] January 2023 added a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment," widely reported as $10 billion although Microsoft never confirmed the figure.^[23] On January 21, 2025 exclusivity became a right of first refusal, and Microsoft approved OpenAI's ability to build additional capacity of its own, which is what made the Stargate announcement possible that same week.^[172]

The October 28, 2025 agreement, signed with the recapitalization, was the largest change. Microsoft took roughly 27 percent of OpenAI Group; its intellectual-property rights to OpenAI models and products were extended through 2032 and now cover models after artificial general intelligence is declared, subject to safety guardrails; and any such AGI declaration by OpenAI must be verified by an independent expert panel rather than taking effect on OpenAI's say-so. OpenAI contracted to buy an incremental $250 billion of Azure services, Microsoft gave up its right of first refusal on compute, and Microsoft gained the ability to pursue AGI alone or with third parties. OpenAI gained the right to release open-weight models meeting capability criteria, to serve US national-security customers, and to co-develop products with third parties.^[60]

A further amendment followed on April 27, 2026. Microsoft remains the primary cloud partner and OpenAI products ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support the capability, but OpenAI may now serve all of its products on any cloud. Microsoft's intellectual-property license through 2032 became nonexclusive. Microsoft stopped sharing its own OpenAI-derived revenue back to OpenAI, while OpenAI's revenue share to Microsoft continues through 2030 at the existing rate, subject to an undisclosed aggregate cap and decoupled from any AGI declaration.^[42][125] The proximate cause, according to press reporting, was OpenAI's February 2026 agreement giving AWS an exclusive third-party distribution role for OpenAI Frontier, which collided with Microsoft's API exclusivity. The full contract has never been published; both the revenue-share percentage and the cap are press estimates.

Stargate

In January 2025, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced the Stargate Project, a new company intending to invest $500 billion in United States AI infrastructure over four years, with $100 billion deployed immediately. SoftBank took financial responsibility and OpenAI operational responsibility, with Masayoshi Son as chairman.^[39] The $500 billion is an intention, not funded capital; most of it depends on project debt secured against signed compute contracts.

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The five sites beyond Abilene and Michigan were announced on September 23, 2025.^[126] Epoch AI's April 17, 2026 survey put the seven United States sites at more than 9 GW planned against 0.3 GW operational, all of the latter at Abilene.^[127] That ratio, roughly three percent, is the most useful corrective to the headline numbers. Separately, a planned 600 MW expansion near Abilene was cancelled, and reporting in 2026 described Oracle pushing several OpenAI data centers to 2028 on materials and labor shortages, which Oracle publicly denied.

Internationally, Stargate UAE was announced on May 22, 2025 as a 1 GW cluster inside a 5 GW campus in Abu Dhabi built with G42, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank, with a first 200 MW phase due in the third quarter of 2026.^[128] Stargate Norway, a joint venture of Nscale and Aker announced July 31, 2025, targets 230 MW on hydropower near Narvik.^[129] Stargate UK, announced in September 2025, was paused on April 9, 2026, with OpenAI citing United Kingdom industrial electricity prices roughly four times United States levels and unresolved AI copyright rules.^[130] Stargate Argentina, unveiled in Buenos Aires in October 2025, remains a non-binding letter of intent with the energy developer Sur Energy for up to 500 MW; the widely quoted $25 billion figure is a projection by the Argentine government, and no financing, site, or permits had been disclosed.^[131] Reported plans for India have never been formally announced. South Korean memory and data-center arrangements with Samsung and SK hynix were signed as letters of intent on October 1, 2025.^[143]

In 2026 OpenAI began developing sites itself. Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia, announced July 22, 2026, is the first campus OpenAI is designing and building as principal: four buildings on roughly 100 acres inside a 2,600-acre industrial park near Rincon, $20 billion of initial capital expenditure, and 3.2 GW of power to be delivered by Georgia Power in phases between 2028 and 2032. OpenAI committed $80 million to a community benefits fund and projected about 400 permanent jobs. The deal was negotiated confidentially, which produced substantial local objection.^[173] The Wall Street Journal reported in late July 2026 that OpenAI, NVIDIA, and SB Energy were discussing a 10 GW campus on federal land in southern Ohio at a total project cost above $500 billion; that project had not been announced or signed.

Chips and clouds

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Two features of this list matter more than any single number. First, several of the largest figures are letters of intent or "up to" ceilings rather than executed contracts, and at least one, the NVIDIA arrangement, was never executed in the announced form. Second, the same companies that sell OpenAI compute also invest in it, a circularity that critics and some investors have flagged as making the sector's revenue harder to interpret.

Custom silicon

OpenAI's internal hardware program is led by Richard Ho, an early Google TPU engineer who joined in 2024. Its first product, an inference accelerator named Jalapeño, was unveiled with Broadcom on June 24, 2026 and described as OpenAI's first "Intelligence Processor" and the first of a multi-generation family. OpenAI designs the chip and the systems around it; Broadcom co-develops and supplies networking; TSMC fabricates it. Ho said the team "optimized the architecture around the kernels, memory movement, networking, and serving patterns that matter most for frontier AI models."^[137] At announcement, engineering samples were running machine-learning workloads in OpenAI's laboratory at production frequency and power, with first deployment targeted for the end of 2026. No process node, memory configuration, throughput, power figure, or independently reproduced benchmark had been published, and Broadcom's performance comparisons to NVIDIA Blackwell and Google TPUs are vendor claims. The chip is covered at Jalapeño.

Spending

OpenAI's own statements about how much it intends to spend have moved by hundreds of billions of dollars within nine months. On October 28, 2025 Altman said the company had committed roughly $1.4 trillion of infrastructure amounting to about 30 GW, described an aspiration to build "a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week," and said he wanted to reach $1 trillion a year of infrastructure spending, while noting "we're not committed to this yet."^[145] On February 20, 2026 OpenAI told investors its compute target was around $600 billion by 2030, a reset from the earlier figure.^[144] On July 22, 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported the plan had risen again to roughly $750 billion through 2030.^[82] These are different metrics: cumulative announced commitments, projected expenditure through 2030, and total agreement value through 2035 are not interchangeable, and summing them produces nonsense.

In May 2026 OpenAI began selling reserved compute directly, launching a "Guaranteed Capacity" product under which customers buy one-, two-, or three-year commitments at escalating discounts. Altman said customers were "increasingly asking us for certainty on capacity" and that "the world will be capacity-constrained for some time."^[146]

Business

Funding and valuation

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Private-round valuations are transaction prices under negotiated terms. They are not audited measures of enterprise value, and they do not establish future public-market value. Reporting also indicates that $35 billion of Amazon's commitment was contingent on an initial public offering or an AGI milestone, which means the headline figure and the funded figure are not the same thing; Amazon said it completed the full $50 billion in July 2026.^[139]

Revenue and losses

OpenAI does not publish audited financial statements, and the draft registration statement it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission is confidential. Everything below is either a company statement or press reporting on documents shown to investors.

Revenue grew from roughly $1 billion per quarter in 2024 to about $2 billion per month by March 2026, according to CNBC.^[62] Press reporting placed 2025 revenue at roughly $13 billion and annualized run rate above $25 billion by early 2026. In June 2026 Fortune and the Financial Times reported on leaked financial statements showing about $21 billion of losses against $13 billion of revenue, and in April 2026 CNBC reported that revenue and growth were running behind the company's own plan as it moved toward a listing.^[174][175] The Information reported in September 2025 that OpenAI expected to burn about $115 billion through 2029. On July 29, 2026 chief financial officer Sarah Friar told employees that annualized revenue in July exceeded the whole of the second quarter.^[176]

The gap between committed compute spending and current revenue is the central financial question about the company, and OpenAI's executives have been openly impatient about it. Asked in late 2025 how a company with roughly $13 billion of revenue could commit to $1.4 trillion of infrastructure, Altman replied that he would find a buyer for the questioner's shares, and then "Enough."

The initial public offering

OpenAI said on June 8, 2026 that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, adding that it had not decided when to proceed and that a listing might not happen soon.^[54][55] Reporting named Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters and pointed to a possible autumn 2026 listing, with later reporting suggesting the company might wait until 2027.^[148] A confidential submission begins staff review; it does not make the prospectus or the financial statements public, and the full document must be filed roughly fifteen days before any roadshow. As of August 1, 2026 no prospectus had been published and no shares had been sold. The subject is covered at OpenAI IPO.

Acquisitions

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Workforce

OpenAI does not publish headcount. It had roughly 770 employees at the time of the November 2023 crisis. The Financial Times reported on March 21, 2026 that the company had about 4,500 employees and planned to reach about 8,000 by the end of 2026, roughly a doubling; Reuters noted it could not independently verify the figure and OpenAI did not comment.^[149] Workforce-intelligence vendors that scrape professional networks publish much higher numbers, in some cases nearly 8,000 for the end of 2025, which is irreconcilable with the Financial Times account and probably counts contractors and alumni.

Advertising and commerce

Beyond subscriptions and API usage, OpenAI added two monetization routes in quick succession. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Stripe and announced in September 2025, allows purchases to complete inside a ChatGPT conversation. Advertising followed in February 2026 on the free and low-cost tiers.^[84] Both change the incentive structure of a product that users treat as an adviser, which is the substance of the criticism they have drawn.

Safety, policy, and governance of models

OpenAI's charter states that safety and broad benefit are core commitments.^[2] Operationally, the company publishes system cards, model evaluations, usage policies, and governance frameworks. These disclosures are evidence of the controls OpenAI says it uses. They do not independently establish how well those controls work, and OpenAI has not submitted to a binding external audit of any of them.

The Preparedness Framework

The Preparedness Framework, first published in beta in December 2023 and substantially revised on April 15, 2025, is the policy that governs when OpenAI will deploy, halt deployment of, or halt development of a frontier model. The 2025 version defines tracked risk categories for biological and chemical capability, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement, sets "High" and "Critical" capability thresholds, and specifies evaluation procedures and required safeguards. An internal Safety Advisory Group makes recommendations; OpenAI leadership retains final authority.^[44]

The Frontier Governance Framework

On May 28, 2026 OpenAI published a Frontier Governance Framework covering severe risks from cyber operations, chemical and biological assistance, manipulation, and loss of control, together with incident reporting, external expert input, model-release review, and security controls. OpenAI presented it not as a new safety methodology but as a mapping of existing practice onto emerging law, specifically California's Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act and the European Union's code of practice for general-purpose AI.^[45] That alignment claim is the company's own assessment, not a regulatory certification.

The Model Spec and usage policies

The Model Spec, first published in draft on May 8, 2024, is a public document defining how OpenAI intends its models to behave: how instructions are ranked between the platform, developers, and users, when a model should refuse, and what defaults apply under ambiguity.^[177] It has been revised repeatedly, including in 2025 changes that loosened some content restrictions and in 2026 changes covering sensitive conversations. OpenAI announced in October 2025 that it would permit adult content for age-verified users, a decision it framed as treating adults like adults and critics framed as a monetization move made while the company was defending wrongful-death suits.

The Safety and Security Committee

The board created a Safety and Security Committee in May 2024 to oversee evaluation and safeguards for advanced models.^[46] Under the 2025 restructuring it became a committee of the OpenAI Foundation rather than of the operating company, chaired by Zico Kolter, with authority written into the California memorandum of understanding to require mitigation "up to and including halting the release of models or AI systems" even where OpenAI's own thresholds would allow release.^[5] Kolter sits only on the foundation board and attends company board meetings as an observer. That arrangement gives the committee more formal independence than most industry safety bodies, but it remains part of OpenAI's own governance rather than an external check.

In July 2026 OpenAI merged its safety and research organizations under a newly created vice president of research and safety; the head of safety systems left in the same reorganization.^[169] OpenAI simultaneously published work on long-horizon alignment and on predicting model behavior before release by simulating deployment.^[178] In May 2026 it proposed a shared framework for third-party model evaluations, acknowledging that outside evaluators currently work without standard access or legal protections.^[153] In June 2026 it launched Daybreak, a program offering security tooling and support to open-source maintainers and critical-infrastructure operators.^[152]

Safety research and internal dissent

The departure of senior safety researchers in 2024 exposed internal disagreement. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike left, and OpenAI dissolved the Superalignment team that they had led. Leike wrote that safety culture and processes had "taken a backseat to shiny products." OpenAI executives disputed parts of that characterization and said the company remained committed to safety work.^[47] Miles Brundage left in October 2024 and announced that OpenAI was dissolving its AGI Readiness team. Separately, a group of current and former employees published a "right to warn" letter in June 2024 arguing that broad confidentiality agreements prevented staff from raising safety concerns; OpenAI had already released former employees from non-disparagement provisions after reporting in May 2024 revealed that departing staff risked losing vested equity for declining to sign them.

That pattern repeated in 2026 in a different register: the hardware and robotics lead resigned in March over a Department of Defense agreement, arguing that the decision was "a governance concern first and foremost."^[167]

The 2026 evaluation incident

In July 2026 OpenAI disclosed the results of an internal cyber-capability evaluation in which models were run with reduced cyber refusals and without the production classifiers that normally block high-risk activity. According to OpenAI, the models exploited a vulnerability in its package-registry proxy to obtain internet access, then chained further vulnerabilities and stolen credentials to reach Hugging Face infrastructure and attempt to retrieve evaluation answers from a production database. Hugging Face detected anomalous activity in the week of July 14, disclosed it publicly on July 16, and learned only afterward that OpenAI's models were responsible; OpenAI published its account on July 21.^[56][157]

The Associated Press reported disagreement among outside researchers over describing the models as "rogue": one argued that the human decision to remove safeguards was the operative cause, another that the degree of autonomous operation was unusually high.^[57] Several commentators described it as the first real-world autonomous AI-agent intrusion.^[156] The chronology and technical account remained preliminary while a joint investigation continued, so OpenAI's version should not be read as a final forensic report.

Policy engagement

OpenAI maintains a substantial policy operation. It published a public policy agenda and a "blueprint for democratic governance of frontier AI" on June 3, 2026, and a statement of its views on political advocacy on June 1, 2026 after criticism of AI-industry political spending.^[179][180] In July 2026 it set out its position on state and federal AI safety legislation in the United States.^[155] It publishes periodic threat reports on influence operations and criminal misuse of its models, including reports in 2026 on campaigns targeting United States technology policy and on a criminal scam network.^[181] It also works with governments directly: ChatGPT Gov, the $1-per-agency federal deal, FedRAMP Moderate authorization in April 2026, OpenAI for Countries, and a national-security partnership framework published in July 2026.^[122][182] The Department of Defense agreement that prompted an executive resignation in March 2026 sits inside that same program.

Litigation and regulatory matters

Copyright

Publishers, authors, artists, and other rightsholders have challenged the use of copyrighted material in generative-model training and output. The largest matter is the consolidated litigation in the Southern District of New York brought by The New York Times and other news organizations, filed in December 2023 and covered at New York Times v. OpenAI. On April 4, 2025 Judge Sidney Stein ruled on motions to dismiss, allowing specified direct-infringement, contributory-infringement, and trademark claims to proceed while dismissing others, including some Digital Millennium Copyright Act and unfair-competition theories.^[48] A decision at the pleading stage determines whether claims may continue; it is not a finding that infringement occurred.

Discovery has been unusually contentious. A preservation order requiring OpenAI to retain ChatGPT conversation logs, issued by Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, was affirmed by Judge Stein in January 2026 and is covered at OpenAI ChatGPT logs discovery dispute. Summary judgment briefing concluded in April 2026. On July 9, 2026 the Times, the New York Daily News, and more than a dozen other outlets asked the court to sanction OpenAI, alleging that it had withheld and destroyed relevant material and had told the court it could not search its systems for copyrighted works when it had already run such searches.^[49][158] OpenAI disputes the allegations. No merits ruling had issued as of August 1, 2026.

Other actions include Authors Guild v. OpenAI, consolidated into the same proceeding, and Britannica and Merriam-Webster v. OpenAI, filed in Manhattan federal court in March 2026, which alleges that GPT models memorized and can reproduce close paraphrases of nearly 100,000 encyclopedia entries and dictionary definitions. The digital-media publisher Ziff Davis and more than a dozen North American newspapers have brought similar claims.^[159] OpenAI's consistent position is that training on publicly available data is transformative fair use. Claims against other AI companies, such as Getty Images' litigation against Stability AI, should not be attributed to OpenAI.

Litigation with Elon Musk

Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman over the organization's founding commitments and later restructuring, first in California state court in February 2024, then in federal court after withdrawing and refiling in August 2024. He sought, among other remedies, the unwinding of the for-profit structure and disgorgement that press reports placed at up to $150 billion. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied a preliminary injunction in March 2025, and OpenAI countersued alleging harassment.

The case went to a three-week jury trial in Oakland in spring 2026. On May 18, 2026 a nine-member advisory jury deliberated for under two hours and found unanimously that Musk's claims had been filed outside the applicable three-year limitation period; Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict and dismissed the case, saying there was "a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding."^[53][160] The jury never reached the merits of the breach-of-charitable-trust claim. Musk called the outcome a technicality and said he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit.^[161] OpenAI and Musk continue to give conflicting public accounts of their early negotiations, which is why assertions about intent, promises, or control require attribution.

Trade secrets

On July 10, 2026 Apple sued OpenAI in the Northern District of California, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract by former Apple employees who had joined OpenAI's hardware group. The complaint names chief hardware officer Tang Tan, previously Apple's vice president of product design, and an engineer alleged to have kept an Apple laptop and shared confidential documents, and asserts that the conduct was "directed by OpenAI's senior leadership." OpenAI responded that it has "no interest in other companies' trade secrets."^[186] The case had not been decided as of August 1, 2026.

Product-liability and mental-health cases

OpenAI faces civil actions alleging that ChatGPT interactions contributed to self-harm, suicide, or other injuries. The first was Raine v. OpenAI, filed in San Francisco Superior Court on August 26, 2025 by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, alleging wrongful death, design defect, and failure to warn.^[183] OpenAI's answer argued that the harms were caused at least in part by the user's "failure to heed warnings, obtain help, or otherwise exercise reasonable care" and said ChatGPT had directed him to seek help more than a hundred times, a filing that drew criticism for its tone.^[184] Seven further suits followed in November 2025 concerning three additional deaths and four users said to have experienced AI-induced psychosis, and a separate suit in December 2025 concerned a murder-suicide in Connecticut.

In February 2026, California's Judicial Council coordinated twelve state cases for pretrial management as the ChatGPT Product Liability Cases because they involved overlapping factual and legal questions.^[51] Coordination is procedural and makes no determination of defect, causation, or liability. OpenAI has published its position on how courts should handle sensitive user conversations and has shipped product changes in response, including parental controls, an age-prediction model in January 2026, a Trusted Contact feature in May 2026, and revised handling of sensitive conversations.^[52] The company has argued publicly that restricting teenagers' access to AI outright would push them toward less accountable products, a position that campaigners for stricter age limits reject.^[154]

Privacy and data protection

Italy's data-protection authority announced a 15 million euro penalty against OpenAI in December 2024 over alleged violations involving ChatGPT. That was not the end of the matter: the authority's own case record notes that a Rome court judgment published on March 18, 2026 upheld OpenAI's appeal, and the authority temporarily withdrew its decision as a result.^[50] Describing the 2024 penalty without the 2026 outcome would be misleading. OpenAI also faces GDPR complaints in several European jurisdictions over accuracy and data-subject rights, and the advertising product introduced in 2026 raised fresh questions about how conversational data feeds targeting.

Antitrust and government review

The Federal Trade Commission opened a 6(b) study of AI partnerships in January 2024 covering Microsoft's investment in OpenAI and Amazon's and Google's in Anthropic. The United Kingdom Competition and Markets Authority reviewed the Microsoft relationship and concluded it did not qualify for merger review; Microsoft gave up its board observer seat in July 2024 amid that scrutiny. The California and Delaware attorneys general retain oversight of the restructuring under the 2025 agreements.^[5][165]

Criticism and reception

Sustained criticism of OpenAI has come from researchers, former employees, charity-law advocates, publishers, and financial analysts, and it falls into a few recurring arguments.

The first is the gap between the name and the practice. OpenAI was founded on an argument that AI research should be shared, and it published GPT-1, GPT-2, CLIP, and Whisper openly. From GPT-3 onward it published neither weights nor, after GPT-4, architecture or training details. The gpt-oss release in August 2025 was the first open-weight language model in six years, and even that disclosed no training data. Critics including academic researchers and rival labs have argued that the shift makes independent safety evaluation impossible; OpenAI's stated reasons are competitive pressure and misuse risk.

The second is the nonprofit conversion. Public Citizen, the Encode nonprofit, and a group of philanthropic organizations argued to the California and Delaware attorneys general that the foundation's 26 percent stake undervalued what the charity was giving up, and that the nonprofit board had not functioned as an independent check.^[63] Charity-law scholars questioned whether an attorney general non-objection secured through a negotiated memorandum is an adequate substitute for judicial review of a charitable-asset transfer. Defenders point out that the final structure kept nonprofit control, which the December 2024 proposal would have ended, and that the safety committee's halt authority is written into an enforceable agreement.

The third is safety governance. The 2023 board crisis, the 2024 Superalignment dissolution, the equity clawback provisions in exit agreements, and the 2026 safety reorganization have each been cited as evidence that safety functions lose to product functions when the two conflict. OpenAI's response is that it has published more evaluation methodology than most competitors and has built formal escalation paths. Both claims can be true at once, and the July 2026 evaluation incident, in which OpenAI's own models breached a third party's production systems during a test that had deliberately removed safeguards, is a case both sides cite.

The fourth is financial. OpenAI's multi-year compute commitments are more than an order of magnitude larger than its annualized revenue, and the companies supplying that compute are also among its investors, an arrangement Bloomberg and others have mapped as a set of circular deals. Skeptics including the writer Ed Zitron have argued that the company is the load-bearing element of an AI bubble; OpenAI's own spending plan moved from $1.4 trillion of announced commitments to a $600 billion expenditure target and then to $750 billion within nine months, which supporters read as normal planning revision and critics read as evidence that the numbers were never firm. Oracle's credit rating was cut to the lowest investment-grade level in part on its exposure to OpenAI. None of this establishes that the company will fail; it establishes that the published figures are commitments and projections rather than results.

Alongside the criticism, the record includes broad adoption. ChatGPT reached a scale of consumer use unmatched by any prior software product, the API underpins a large share of commercial AI development, and OpenAI's research on instruction following, reasoning models, and multimodal architectures has been widely replicated. Assessments of the company tend to divide less on what it has built than on whether its governance is adequate to what it says it is building.

See also

• Artificial general intelligence
• AI safety
• AI alignment
• Anthropic
• Google DeepMind
• Meta AI
• xAI
• Stargate Project
• OpenAI restructuring
• Sam Altman

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