OpenAI

Who owns OpenAI?
OpenAI's ownership is in transition. The company was originally structured as a non-profit (OpenAI, Inc.) controlling a capped-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP). Major investors include Amazon (up to $50 billion committed), Nvidia ($30 billion), SoftBank ($30 billion), Microsoft (approximately $13 billion in prior investments), Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company is converting to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which would give the non-profit a significant equity stake but remove its operational control. Sam Altman holds no direct equity in OpenAI.

Is OpenAI publicly traded?
No, OpenAI is a private company as of August 2026. The company confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC in June 2026 but has not disclosed a public timeline for the offering. The March 2026 funding round valued OpenAI at $852 billion with $122 billion in committed capital, making it the largest private funding round in history.

What is OpenAI's annual revenue?
OpenAI reported revenue of $13.1 billion in 2025, up from $3.7 billion in 2024. By mid-2026, the company was generating approximately $2 billion in revenue per month, with annualized revenue topping $25 billion as of March 2026. Enterprise revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of total revenue. Despite this growth, the company is not profitable, with a loss from operations of $20.92 billion in 2025.

Who founded OpenAI?
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. The founders committed approximately $1 billion in initial funding. Elon Musk resigned from the board in February 2018 and later filed a lawsuit against the company. Sam Altman has served as CEO since founding, with a brief five-day interruption in November 2023.

What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI chatbot, launched in November 2022. It became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million users in two months. As of 2026, ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users and approximately 50 million paid subscribers. It is available as a free tier and through paid subscriptions including ChatGPT Plus ($20/month), ChatGPT Team ($25/user/month), and ChatGPT Enterprise (custom pricing).

What is the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft?
Microsoft has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI and is a key strategic partner. Microsoft integrates OpenAI's models into products including Bing, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Azure OpenAI Service. OpenAI paid $10.59 billion to Microsoft in 2025 for compute infrastructure under their partnership. The relationship remains central to both companies' AI strategies, though OpenAI has diversified its investor base with Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank taking larger roles in the 2026 funding round.

How does OpenAI make money?
OpenAI generates revenue through consumer subscriptions to ChatGPT (Plus, Team, Enterprise), per-token API fees charged to developers and businesses using its models, and large enterprise contracts. Enterprise revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of total revenue. The company's API processes over 15 billion tokens per minute. Despite generating $13.1 billion in 2025 revenue, OpenAI is not profitable due to R&D costs of $19.18 billion and cost of revenue of $7.5 billion.

What is OpenAI's valuation?
OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in its March 2026 funding round, which raised $122 billion in committed capital. The round was anchored by Amazon (up to $50 billion), Nvidia ($30 billion), and SoftBank ($30 billion). This was the largest private funding round in history. For context, OpenAI's rival Anthropic surpassed OpenAI by valuation earlier in 2026.

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory in San Francisco. The founding group included Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator; Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; Greg Brockman; Ilya Sutskever; Wojciech Zaremba; and John Schulman. The founders committed approximately $1 billion in initial funding. The stated mission was to develop artificial general intelligence in a way that would benefit all of humanity.

In its early years, OpenAI published research on reinforcement learning and developed OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for reinforcement learning research. The company also built OpenAI Five, an AI system that defeated professional players at the video game Dota 2. In 2018, OpenAI released GPT-1, its first large language model, demonstrating the potential of transformer-based language modeling at scale.

Elon Musk resigned from OpenAI's board in February 2018, citing potential conflicts of interest with Tesla's autonomous vehicle AI development. Musk later became a vocal critic of OpenAI's direction and filed a lawsuit against the company in 2024 alleging that it had abandoned its non-profit mission.

In 2019, OpenAI created a hybrid corporate structure, establishing OpenAI LP as a capped-profit subsidiary controlled by the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. The capped-profit structure limited investor returns to 100 times their investment, with any excess going to the non-profit. This structure allowed OpenAI to raise the capital needed for large-scale AI training while maintaining non-profit oversight.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, beginning a strategic partnership that became central to both companies' AI strategies. Microsoft subsequently invested additional capital, bringing its total commitment to approximately $13 billion by 2023. In exchange, Microsoft received rights to commercialize OpenAI's technology through its Azure cloud platform and integrated OpenAI's models into products including Bing, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

GPT-3, released in June 2020, was a breakthrough in large language model capabilities. With 175 billion parameters, it demonstrated that scaling model size and training data could produce dramatically improved performance across a wide range of language tasks.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a watershed moment for the AI industry. Built on the GPT-3.5 model, ChatGPT reached 1 million users in five days and 100 million users in two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The launch triggered a wave of AI investment and competition, with Google, Meta, Amazon, and numerous startups accelerating their AI programs.

GPT-4, released in March 2023, improved on reasoning, accuracy, and multimodal capabilities. OpenAI also expanded its product portfolio with DALL-E 3 for image generation, Whisper for speech recognition, and Sora for video generation.

In November 2023, OpenAI's board of directors abruptly fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing a loss of confidence in his leadership. The crisis lasted five days. Nearly all of OpenAI's employees threatened to resign, and Microsoft offered to hire Altman and the departing staff. Altman was reinstated, and the board members who had fired him resigned. The episode exposed governance tensions in OpenAI's unusual non-profit and for-profit structure.

In late 2024, OpenAI announced plans to convert from its hybrid structure to a public benefit corporation. The conversion would give the non-profit a significant equity stake but remove its control over operations. The conversion is subject to regulatory approval from the attorneys general of California and Delaware.

In 2025, OpenAI's revenue grew from $3.7 billion to $13.1 billion. The company's monthly revenue reached nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025. However, costs grew even faster. Research and development expenses reached $19.18 billion, cost of revenue reached $7.5 billion, and sales and marketing expenses reached $5.73 billion. The company shut down Sora, its video generation product, in March 2026 as part of cost-cutting measures.

In March 2026, OpenAI closed a record-breaking funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. The round was anchored by Amazon (up to $50 billion), Nvidia ($30 billion), and SoftBank ($30 billion), with continued participation from Microsoft. SoftBank co-led alongside Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. OpenAI also expanded its revolving credit facility to approximately $4.7 billion.

In June 2026, both OpenAI and its rival Anthropic confidentially filed for IPOs with the SEC. Neither company has disclosed a public timeline for their offerings. In July 2026, CFO Sarah Friar told employees that annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded the entire second quarter, a signal the company used to reassure staff about business health amid intensifying competition.

OpenAI has faced significant controversy related to its governance, mission, competitive practices, and the planned for-profit conversion.

The November 2023 board crisis, in which Sam Altman was briefly fired and then reinstated, exposed governance tensions in OpenAI's non-profit and for-profit structure. The episode raised questions about whether the non-profit's mission was compatible with the company's commercial ambitions.

Elon Musk, a co-founder, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024 alleging that the company had abandoned its non-profit mission and was operating primarily for the benefit of Microsoft and other investors. Musk also founded xAI, a competing AI company that developed the Grok model. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The planned conversion to a public benefit corporation has drawn criticism from non-profit advocates and some regulators who argue it would effectively transfer the non-profit's assets to for-profit investors. The attorneys general of California and Delaware are reviewing the conversion. The valuation of the non-profit's equity stake in the new entity is a central issue.

OpenAI faces copyright lawsuits from authors, news organizations, and other content creators alleging that the company trained its models on copyrighted content without permission. These cases are working through U.S. courts and could result in significant financial liabilities or changes to how AI companies acquire training data.

The company has also faced scrutiny over its compute spending and environmental impact. OpenAI's plan to target $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, including discussions with Nvidia about a $250 billion backstop for an Ohio data center, has raised questions about energy consumption and the sustainability of large-scale AI infrastructure.

In March 2026, OpenAI shut down Sora, its video generation product, as part of cost-cutting measures. CEO of Applications Fidji Simo told employees the company would be cutting back on side projects and focusing on core coding and business users.