OpenAI accidentally built one of the world’s richest charities. Now what? |
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OpenAI accidentally built one of the world’s richest charities. Now what?
The battle over what OpenAI owes the public.
When Sam Altman first told her that he’d never let OpenAI go corporate, that what he and his colleagues were building was too powerful to be driven by investors, Catherine Bracy more or less believed him.
The conversation took place in 2022, when Bracy, CEO and founder of the social mobility-focused nonprofit TechEquity, was interviewing Altman for a book she was writing about the dangers of venture capital. It was before Altman’s mysterious firing and unfiring a year later, after which he mostly stopped responding to Bracy’s texts.
And ever since then, OpenAI — which was initially founded as a nonprofit in 2015 to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” — has been publicly trying to escape the confines of its charitable roots. Today, OpenAI contains both a corporate arm focused on building and selling AI and a nonprofit arm with a stated mission of ensuring that AI benefits people.
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During the controversial process of trying to fully sever the two in 2024, OpenAI lost about half of its AI safety staffers and much of its senior leadership. That was followed by an intensified scrutiny from state attorneys general, nonprofit legal experts, competitor companies, effective altruists, Nobel Prize winners, vast swaths of California’s philanthropic community, and one of its original funders, Elon Musk. Different sides had different interests, but the overall argument was that shifting to a for-profit model would create a fiduciary duty to investors that would inherently clash with its original mission of safety and public benefit.
Is OpenAI’s new foundation a $180 billion distraction?
Last October, OpenAI agreed to make its nonprofit arm very rich. The OpenAI Foundation is now worth about $180 billion and it has two main objectives:Helping the world adapt to and benefit from AI by giving money to charity.Acting as a moral compass for OpenAI the company, especially when it comes to safety and security decisions.
Helping the world adapt to and benefit from AI by giving money to charity.
Acting as a moral compass for OpenAI the company, especially when it comes to safety and security decisions.
The foundation has already given away about $40.5 million so far, a small fraction of the billions it plans to eventually donate. But critics see the donations as a distraction.
While OpenAI says its foundation has the final say on security and safety-related decisions, the company has come under scrutiny in recent months for striking a deal with the Pentagon, fighting against statewide AI legislation, and testing ads for free users.
Even if the foundation does eventually give away billions of dollars, it may never be enough to make up for what the public lost in allowing OpenAI to go corporate.
Nonetheless, OpenAI did finally strike a contortive restructuring deal last October. Essentially, the for-profit arm became what is known as a public benefit corporation (PBC), called the OpenAI Group. The original nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation, which has a 26 percent stake currently worth $180 billion in the PBC, plus a sliver of exclusive legal control over certain major decisions.
One effect of the transition was that it essentially required OpenAI to put a number on what it owed the public for converting what had been a project for all humanity into something that most directly benefits the company’s investors. The resulting stake of the OpenAI Foundation is big enough to instantly make it one of the wealthiest charities in the country, or in OpenAI’s words, the “best-equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen.” On paper, at least, the foundation is now significantly richer than the entire country of Luxembourg. Even the Gates Foundation has only $77.6 billion in assets, less than half of what the OpenAI Foundation can draw from, though it’s important to note that most of the wealth of the OpenAI Foundation is locked in fairly illiquid shares within the still private company, which limits how quickly any money can be given away.
Still, its sheer size means that the OpenAI Foundation stands to eventually be a transformative presence on the philanthropic stage, one way or another. But while OpenAI says the foundation will eventually give out many billions of dollars in philanthropy to ensure that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” it’s uncertain that a socially beneficial philanthropy can exist side by side with a company that is fighting an existential battle over who will dominate the AI industry.
“The unspoken truth here is that they’re never going to make a decision that is bad for the company,” Bracy said. “These two entities cannot live under the same roof” where “the mission is in control.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)
The foundation’s first gifts came in the form of $40.5 million in no-strings-attached grants to over 200 community nonprofits, like churches, food banks, and afterschool programs. Notably, most grantees had little to no connection to AI or technology — and just as notably, several of these early grantees just so happen to be members of EyesOnOpenAI, a coalition of California nonprofits critical of OpenAI’s privatization that formed in 2025.
But there are signs the foundation will soon pivot into grantmaking that’s more obviously relevant to the company’s original charter, which aimed to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly distributed while also prioritizing long-term safety in the technology’s development. On Feb. 19, OpenAI — the company, not the foundation — announced a $7.5 million grant in conjunction with Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, and other major tech companies for a new, international project aimed at........