OpenAI: What It Is, Who Runs It, and What It Sells

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OpenAI is the American company behind ChatGPT and the GPT family of models. Founded in 2015 as a non-profit with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, it’s now one of the world’s most highly valued private companies, providing models used by Microsoft, millions of businesses, and hundreds of millions of people. Below: who founded it, what exactly it offers, where its money comes from, and the biggest controversies surrounding it.

Who Founded OpenAI

The company was founded in December 2015 in San Francisco. Among the founders and early backers were Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrej Karpathy, and John Schulman. Musk left the board in 2018 and now runs competing company xAI, with disputes between him and Altman also playing out in court.

What OpenAI Actually Sells

What’s no longer available: the Sora video generator was shut down on April 26, 2026, as we describe in Sora and Sora 2 shut down, and DALL·E was replaced by the image model built into ChatGPT.

A Corporate Structure Nobody Can Explain in One Sentence

OpenAI started as a foundation, and in 2019 added a capped-profit company so it could accept capital to train models. For years, control formally rested with the board of the non-profit organization, which in November 2023 led to the loudest crisis in the company’s history: the board fired Altman, after several days and a staff revolt he returned to his position, and the board changed. Since then, the company has undergone further structural changes toward becoming a regular company with a social mission. The details of this puzzle change every few months, so before citing them in your work, check the current state at the source.

Money and Dependencies

The largest capital and technology partner is Microsoft, which provided money and computing power in Azure, and in return got the right to use the models in its products, including Copilot. The company remains unprofitable: the costs of training and maintaining models are growing faster than subscription revenue, and successive funding rounds value it in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re deliberately not including exact figures, because they change from round to round and any number given will be outdated in a few weeks.

Controversies Worth Knowing

Copyright. Publishers and authors are suing the company for training models on their content without permission; some media outlets have signed licensing agreements instead. Safety. Multiple safety researchers have left, claiming that the pace of product releases wins over caution; some of them have started their own companies. Competition. Anthropic, Google, and Chinese labs have closed the gap to months, making technological advantage no longer obvious; we show current model positions in our ranking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Microsoft Own OpenAI?

No. Microsoft is the largest investor and cloud partner, but not the owner of the company.

Who Runs OpenAI?

Sam Altman, with a brief interruption in November 2023. Bret Taylor is board chair, and Jakub Pachocki leads research.

Verified September 18, 2026 against company materials and press reports. Ownership structure and valuations change frequently, so confirm dates and roles at the source before using them. The assessment that “advantage is no longer obvious” is our opinion.

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