OpenAI constructed a $180 billion charity. Will it do any good?

When Sam Altman first informed her that he’d by no means let OpenAI go company, that what he and his colleagues have been constructing was too highly effective to be pushed by buyers, Catherine Bracy roughly believed him.

The dialog befell in 2022, when Bracy, CEO and founding father of the social mobility-focused nonprofit TechEquity, was interviewing Altman for a e book she was writing concerning the risks of enterprise capital. It was earlier than Altman’s mysterious firing and unfiring a 12 months later, after which he principally stopped responding to Bracy’s texts.

And ever since then, OpenAI — which was initially based as a nonprofit in 2015 to “advance digital intelligence in the best way that’s most probably to learn humanity as an entire, unconstrained by a must generate monetary return” — has been publicly making an attempt to flee the confines of its charitable roots. At the moment, OpenAI incorporates each a company arm centered on constructing and promoting AI and a nonprofit arm with a acknowledged mission of guaranteeing that AI advantages folks.

In the course of the controversial means of making an attempt to absolutely sever the 2 in 2024, OpenAI misplaced about half of its AI security staffers and far of its senior management. That was adopted by an intensified scrutiny from state attorneys basic, nonprofit authorized consultants, competitor corporations, efficient altruists, Nobel Prize winners, huge swaths of California’s philanthropic group, and one among its authentic funders, Elon Musk. Completely different sides had totally different pursuits, however the total argument was that shifting to a for-profit mannequin would create a fiduciary obligation to buyers that might inherently conflict with its authentic mission of security and public profit.

Nonetheless, OpenAI did lastly strike a contortive restructuring deal final October. Basically, the for-profit arm grew to become what is called a public profit company (PBC), known as the OpenAI Group. The unique nonprofit grew to become the OpenAI Basis, which has a 26 % stake at the moment value $180 billion within the PBC, plus a sliver of unique authorized management over sure main selections.

One impact of the transition was that it primarily required OpenAI to place a quantity on what it owed the general public for changing what had been a challenge for all humanity into one thing that the majority immediately advantages the corporate’s buyers. The ensuing stake of the OpenAI Basis is large enough to immediately make it one of many wealthiest charities within the nation, or in OpenAI’s phrases, the “best-equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen.” On paper, at the least, the muse is now considerably richer than your entire nation of Luxembourg. Even the Gates Basis has solely $77.6 billion in property, lower than half of what the OpenAI Basis can draw from, although it’s essential to notice that many of the wealth of the OpenAI Basis is locked in pretty illiquid shares throughout the nonetheless non-public firm, which limits how shortly any cash might be given away.

Nonetheless, its sheer dimension signifies that the OpenAI Basis stands to ultimately be a transformative presence on the philanthropic stage, a method or one other. However whereas OpenAI says the muse will ultimately give out many billions of {dollars} in philanthropy to make sure that “synthetic basic intelligence advantages all of humanity,” it’s unsure {that a} socially useful philanthropy can exist facet by facet with an organization that’s combating an existential battle over who will dominate the AI trade.

“The unstated fact right here is that they’re by no means going to decide that’s unhealthy for the corporate,” Bracy mentioned. “These two entities can not dwell below the identical roof” the place “the mission is in management.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one among a number of publishers which have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting stays editorially impartial.)

The muse’s first items got here within the type of $40.5 million in no-strings-attached grants to over 200 group nonprofits, like church buildings, meals banks, and afterschool packages. Notably, most grantees had little to no connection to AI or expertise — and simply as notably, a number of of those early grantees simply so occur to be members of EyesOnOpenAI, a coalition of California nonprofits important of OpenAI’s privatization that shaped in 2025.

However there are indicators the muse will quickly pivot into grantmaking that’s extra clearly related to the corporate’s authentic constitution, which aimed to make sure that the advantages of AI are broadly distributed whereas additionally prioritizing long-term security within the expertise’s growth. On Feb. 19, OpenAI — the corporate, not the muse — introduced a $7.5 million grant together with Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, and different main tech corporations for a new, worldwide challenge geared toward researching the right way to make AI programs safer.

The actual questions across the OpenAI Basis have much less to do with how a lot it’s giving and to whom than whether or not it’s truly capable of perform its contractual oversight position. In principle, the muse ought to be guaranteeing that OpenAI is the standard-bearer for moral decision-making on the frontier of AI growth. That will be a singular contribution to the sector — and an embodiment of OpenAI’s authentic mission — that no quantity of grantmaking may exchange. But, a collection of troubling current selections by the corporate hardly appears to bear out that imaginative and prescient.

OpenAI has begun its new company journey by debuting adverts on its free tier service, firing an govt who raised security considerations a couple of soon-to-come NSFW mode for ChatGPT on prices of sexual discrimination towards a male colleague, and burning money whereas its president funnels thousands and thousands of {dollars} into Donald Trump’s tremendous PAC. OpenAI President Greg Brockman has additionally teamed up with the non-public fairness agency Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir’s co-founders to fund a $125 million tremendous PAC geared toward selling AI-friendly insurance policies. Together with Google, xAI, and Anthropic, OpenAI has additionally come below scrutiny in current weeks for its protection contracts with the Pentagon.

When OpenAI succeeded in its marketing campaign to cede its foundational new expertise from nonprofit management, it opened the door for a lot of of those selections. Even $180 billion in charity won’t be sufficient to make up for the distinction.

How OpenAI shed its nonprofit pores and skin

Company charity is ubiquitous within the tech world, particularly among the many greatest gamers. Microsoft plans to donate $4 billion in money and AI cloud expertise to colleges and nonprofits by 2030. Google offers away some $100 million yearly, usually to organizations centered on synthetic intelligence and expertise.

However from the start, OpenAI was totally different. Reasonably than being profitable and giving a few of it to charity, OpenAI was the charity. It was based as a nonprofit analysis lab with about $1 billion in start-up donations, principally from tech titans like Altman, Brockman, and Elon Musk.

There are some structural benefits to being a charity. You may’t settle for investments, however you possibly can settle for donations and also you don’t should pay most taxes. What’s extra, in these early days, OpenAI’s acknowledged mission — to construct secure AI with out the pressures of economic incentive — gave it a significant enhance when it got here to recruitment for rarified expertise. Machine studying prodigy Ilya Sutskever informed Wired in 2016 that he selected to depart Google to turn into OpenAI’s chief scientist “to a really massive extent, due to its mission.”

However there have been limits to being a totally nonprofit entity. In pursuit of financing amid the rising computing prices of cutting-edge AI, OpenAI created its capped-profit subsidiary in 2019 to handle a brand new $1 billion funding from Microsoft. Three years later, ChatGPT took the world by storm. Sutskever, and different members of OpenAI’s board, tried and finally failed to oust Altman amid accusations of dishonesty in 2023. (Altman denied these accusations.) In 2024 — one 12 months after Sutskever and different members of OpenAI’s board tried and finally did not oust Altman amid accusations of dishonesty — the group introduced its intention to go absolutely company and splinter off the nonprofit into its personal absolutely impartial entity.

The transition to for-profit “simply didn’t odor proper,” mentioned Orson Aguilar, head of LatinoProsperity, an financial justice nonprofit and Bracy’s co-leader at EyesOnOpenAI. He wasn’t alone: By early 2025, a dozen former OpenAI staff filed an amicus temporary geared toward stopping the conversion as a result of it might “essentially violate its mission.” And greater than 60 nonprofit, philanthropy, and labor leaders, a lot of them based mostly in OpenAI’s residence state of California, agreed that the try to privatize felt unfair given the extent to which the corporate benefited from its tax-free standing throughout its early growth.

However California historical past did present some hope that the general public may at the least get some significant profit from the transition. Again within the Nineties, California’s department of the well being insurer Blue Cross Blue Protect — then a nonprofit known as Blue Cross of California — determined to denationalise. After some haggling with state regulators, the corporate agreed to forfeit all of its property, value $3.2 billion, to a pair of impartial nonprofits in trade for going non-public. The end result was the California Endowment, which is now the state’s largest well being basis.

Many nonprofit leaders in California hoped that OpenAI, which is headquartered within the state, would strike an analogous deal, ceding a majority of its property to a totally impartial nonprofit. And people property have been and are huge.

Gary Mendoza, a former state official who oversaw the Blue Cross deal, estimated the OpenAI nonprofit’s rightful property at over $250 billion, or half the corporate’s $500 billion value. “Something wanting 50 %,” he informed the San Francisco Examiner final 12 months, “is a missed alternative.” And past cash for the general public, assuming the nonprofit saved its shares, it might add as much as sufficient affect to actually form OpenAI’s company decision-making at a key second for the way forward for synthetic intelligence.

Provided that the OpenAI Basis ended up with little greater than 1 / 4 of the ultimate firm, that is clearly not what occurred. However EyesOnOpenAI’s years-long lobbying effort was not a complete bust. The criticism proved highly effective sufficient that final Could, OpenAI was pressured to surrender on an preliminary plan to restructure away its nonprofit property into a brand new group wholly disconnected from OpenAI, which might have left the nonprofit with no authorized management over the for-profit arm.

On paper, the new deal consists of some significant concessions. It contractually requires the nonprofit mission to come back first on security and safety points, with no regard to shareholder pursuits. The memorandum additionally calls on OpenAI to “mitigate dangers to teenagers” particularly. It made the muse the controlling shareholder of the company, affording it the appropriate to nominate company administrators and oversee important selections like a sale.

If OpenAI abided by all of its phrases and ultimately began gifting away billions of {dollars} of philanthropy every year, then the world — or at the least California, the place a lot of OpenAI’s grants have been concentrated — may stand to enormously profit from it.

Random acts of company kindness

And this brings us to the $40.5 million that OpenAI gave to over 200 nonprofits towards the top of final 12 months.

Many of those charities utilized to the grant with refined concepts round the right way to assist their communities combine or adapt to AI, although they will finally use the grants nonetheless they see match. Amongst them have been public libraries, Boys and Women Golf equipment, church buildings, meals banks, and authorized support nonprofits. Coming at a second when nearly all of the nation’s nonprofits face existential funding cuts, “it was simply the right timing,” mentioned Thomas Howard Jr, head of Kidznotes, a North Carolina nonprofit centered on music schooling that obtained $45,000 in OpenAI’s first spherical of grants.

So civil society’s battle over the OpenAI transition gained at the least sufficient concessions to assist these worthy organizations and retain some semblance of nonprofit management over among the for-profit’s actions. So why achieve this many individuals within the philanthropic group stay so destructive concerning the basis?

“I’m all for nonprofits getting cash,” mentioned Bracy, the pinnacle of TechEquity. “I don’t begrudge any organizations that took the cash, however I don’t assume it’s some indication that OpenAI resides as much as the mission of the nonprofit.”

$40.5 million, in fact, is barely 0.02 % of the OpenAI Basis’s on-paper $180 billion windfall. How the muse will ultimately spend the opposite 99.98 % stays to be seen, although the muse has mentioned that at the least $25 billion will finally go to scientific analysis and what it’s calling “technical options for AI resilience.” The corporate plans to announce a second wave of grants directed at organizations utilizing AI to work throughout points like well being within the coming months.

“We’re doing the essential work of partaking with consultants, studying from communities, and shaping a perspective of the place Basis investments could make the best distinction,” the OpenAI Basis’s board of administrators mentioned in response to a request for readability on the place future funding will go. “We sit up for sharing extra quickly.”

However to date, critics stay skeptical. OpenAI has executed little to show that its newfound philanthropy is extra than simply “a smoke and mirrors present,” argued one member of the Coalition for AI Nonprofit Integrity (CANI) — a coalition composed largely of AI insiders, together with former OpenAI staff, furiously against the restructuring. He spoke on the situation of anonymity as a result of he feared retaliation from OpenAI, which has accused CANI of being a entrance funded by Musk. (CANI has denied receiving any such funds — although not for lack of making an attempt. Should you scroll to the underside of OpenTheft, a web site created by CANI, you’ll discover a direct plea to Musk for donations.)

Whereas a spokesperson for OpenAI mentioned that the muse is within the means of constructing a devoted staff, and has sought the enter of each nonprofit leaders and consultants in how society can adapt to AI, the corporate has but to make any main staffing bulletins for its grantmaking arm. For now, aside from Zico Kolter, the pinnacle of the nonprofit’s security committee, the muse board nonetheless shares the identical members as the company board, together with CEO Sam Altman. The thought is that these board members can placed on totally different hats when assembly about nonprofit versus company priorities, asserting the muse’s oversight when wanted. But it surely has created the looks of a battle of curiosity.

When requested for mechanisms and examples for the way the muse has responded to conditions the place its mission conflicts with shareholder pursuits, given the overlapping board membership, the spokesperson mentioned that OpenAI has conflict-of-interest insurance policies and governance procedures in place to make sure its administrators solely contemplate the mission once they meet, as they commonly do, about nonprofit points.

The corporate additionally mentioned the muse board consistently workouts its oversight position, together with for all new main product releases, like the discharge of GPT‑5.3‑Codex, a sophisticated agentic coding mannequin, final month. The AI watchdog group the Midas Undertaking, a frequent thorn in OpenAI’s facet, accused the corporate of violating security requirements, an allegation that OpenAI fervently denied.

In any case, for the reason that OpenAI Basis will not be a separate entity with its personal impartial board, some critics have in contrast it to different feel-good company social duty ventures, just like the McDonald’s Ronald McDonald Home, Walmart’s wholesome meals program, and House Depot’s work with veterans.

Company social duty has its place, and it will probably do actual good. However Bracy believes that based mostly on the OpenAI Basis’s structuring and the way they’ve performed their grantmaking to date, it can in all probability by no means fund something “they see as a menace to the expansion of the corporate,” mentioned Bracy, although the necessity for guardrails on unrestricted AI growth featured prominently within the firm’s authentic mission. “They’re going to do what’s finest for the underside line of the for-profit.”

Critics like Bracy additionally doubt the OpenAI Basis’s different predominant prerogative, which is to control all security and ethics-related points for the broader group, together with the duty to evaluate new merchandise.

Whereas the nonprofit and its mission do legally retain management over the OpenAI company — notably in the case of questions of safety — which will add as much as little, provided that the OpenAI Basis doesn’t appear to be an independently ruled basis. It’s not, the truth is, even technically a basis, however a public charity, which suggests it isn’t required to pay out a sure share of its property every year below IRS necessities.

And whereas the nonprofit retains vital oversight powers on paper — together with the authority to halt AI releases it deems unsafe — in observe, critics say, it’s unclear whether or not it might ever use them.

More and more, OpenAI has additionally been wading into political lobbying efforts that appear at odds with its mission to advertise long-term security in AI growth. When California lawmakers have been debating SB 53, a regulation requiring transparency experiences from main AI corporations, OpenAI lobbied towards it. And the corporate has come below intense scrutiny in current weeks for its contract with the Pentagon, which has blacklisted its rival firm Anthropic for elevating moral considerations about the usage of its expertise.

Why the battle will not be over

OpenAI’s new company association could be very, very new. It’s nonetheless doable that OpenAI’s grantmaking arm actually does workers up, and the nonprofit builds an impartial board that has the facility to implement exhausting moral selections for the corporate, even when it hurts buyers’ returns.

“They’ve lots of freedom to proceed to do good,” mentioned Tyler Johnston, govt director of the Midas Undertaking, however that might require them to “truly shake issues up” and “present that they’ve created the scaffolding that may allow them to actualize their mission.”

However to date, “there’s nothing I’ve seen that offers me reassurance that they’ll catch the essential questions of safety once they come up,” he mentioned. “Or that they’ll be doing an intensive investigation of the grantmaking alternatives.”

If OpenAI doesn’t abide by the phrases of its new contract — if the corporate, for instance, tries to thwart an try to roll again a harmful new software — then California’s legal professional basic does have the facility to demand solutions from the corporate, and in principle, revisit the settlement’s phrases.

Past the settlement, there are a number of fairly public means by which OpenAI’s former lovers, skeptics, and nemeses are nonetheless making an attempt to press rewind on the restructuring.

Chief amongst them is Elon Musk, OpenAI’s most distinguished authentic donor and co-founder. In between buying and selling embarrassing jabs with Altman on X, Musk took OpenAI to courtroom final 12 months over claims that he was “assiduously manipulated” into donating tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to a nonprofit analysis lab that was an “opaque internet of for-profit OpenAI associates.”

A choose has discovered sufficient trigger for the case to proceed to trial this April. Musk is suing for as much as $134 billion in damages, although OpenAI has informed its buyers that it believes it might solely be on the hook for Musk’s $38 billion in authentic donations. OpenAI, for its half, has accused Musk of an “illegal marketing campaign of harassment.”

In the meantime, CANI continues to be holding out hope that it will probably persuade the folks of California to vote for a hyperspecific poll measure, the California Charitable Belongings Safety Act, which may reverse the choice to permit OpenAI — or every other “organizations creating transformative applied sciences” — to go company.

“They’re chopping corners on security due to the race to synthetic basic intelligence that they only wish to win,” mentioned the member of CANI. “As an alternative of a automobile to serve humanity, it’s turn into a automobile to serve one particular person and some of his associates and buyers.”

So possibly the battle over OpenAI’s restructuring isn’t fully over — nevertheless it’s in all probability on its final legs. And in the event that they proceed on the identical path, it’s unlikely that the general public will ever actually profit in the best way they must, given the charitable advantages OpenAI loved in its early days. On the very least, $40.5 million is simply not going to chop it. Even $180 billion may fall far brief.

“I feel it’s them saying, ‘Hear, I dare you to implement this,’” mentioned Bracy, who believes OpenAI is “banking on the truth that they’re value nearly a trillion {dollars}, they usually have infinite assets — and the state of California doesn’t.”