In December 2015, a group of tech people including Elon Musk and Sam Altman announced they were starting a nonprofit AI research lab. The pitch was simple: AI is going to be extremely powerful, and it should not be controlled by one company. So they would build it in the open, for everyone.
Ten years later, OpenAI is a company valued at $157 billion, backed by $13 billion from Microsoft, and racing to become a for-profit corporation. The "open" part of OpenAI is mostly gone. Whether you see this as a betrayal or a necessary evolution depends on who you ask.
The early days were genuinely idealistic. OpenAI published its research, released its models for free, and tried to advance AI safety alongside capability. The founding team pledged $1 billion, though much of that was in the form of commitments rather than cash.
Musk left the board in 2018, citing potential conflicts with Tesla's own AI work. This would become relevant later.
The problem that became obvious pretty quickly: training AI models is absurdly expensive. GPT-2, released in 2019, cost an estimated $50,000 to train. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to what came next. By 2023, training a frontier model cost tens of millions of dollars. Today, it costs hundreds of millions. A nonprofit relying on donations could not keep up.
In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary. Investors could put money in and earn returns, but those returns were capped at 100x their investment. The nonprofit would still technically sit on top, controlling the overall mission.
This was the moment a lot of the original supporters started getting uncomfortable. The mission had been "benefit all of humanity." Now there was a profit motive in the mix, even if it had a cap on it.
Microsoft came in with a $1 billion investment. Then more. By 2023, Microsoft had invested $13 billion total and integrated OpenAI's models into Bing, Office, Azure, and basically everything else Microsoft makes.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and hit 100 million users within two months. For context, it took TikTok about nine months and Instagram over two years to reach that number.
The product was not technically new — GPT-3 had been available through an API since 2020 — but wrapping it in a simple chat interface made it accessible to everyone. My mom used it. My neighbor used it. People who had never thought about AI were suddenly having conversations with it daily.
Revenue followed. OpenAI hit $2 billion in annualized revenue by late 2023 and was reportedly on track for $5 billion by the end of 2024. ChatGPT Plus subscriptions at $20/month, enterprise contracts, and API access were all driving growth.
In November 2023, OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman as CEO. The reasons were vague — the board said Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications." What followed was one of the strangest weeks in tech history.
Almost all of OpenAI's employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. The board backed down within five days. Altman was reinstated. Several board members were replaced. The whole episode lasted less than a week but it revealed something: the nonprofit governance structure was not really in control. The employees, the investors, and the commercial momentum were.
By early 2025, OpenAI announced plans to restructure into a full for-profit public benefit corporation. The nonprofit would retain a minority stake but would no longer have the veto power it once held over the company's direction.
Elon Musk sued, arguing the conversion violated the original nonprofit charter. The case is still playing out. Musk has since launched his own AI company, xAI, which makes his motives in the lawsuit a subject of debate.
The funding round that valued OpenAI at $157 billion was led by SoftBank, with participation from existing investors. To put that valuation in perspective: it is more than the market cap of most Fortune 500 companies, and OpenAI is not yet profitable by most accounts.
OpenAI's models power a lot of things you interact with daily, even if you do not use ChatGPT directly. Microsoft Copilot, which is built into Windows, Office, and Bing, runs on OpenAI technology. Many apps and services use OpenAI's API behind the scenes.
When a company this large and this fast-moving controls a technology this powerful, the decisions it makes about safety, access, and transparency affect everyone. And the shift from nonprofit to for-profit means those decisions are now shaped by investor expectations, not just research ideals.
From a safety perspective, OpenAI's models are being used by both defenders and attackers. Scammers use AI to write more convincing phishing emails, generate fake customer support personas, and create deepfake content. The tools we build at ScamKit, like our message checker and link scanner, are partly a response to this reality.
OpenAI is in a strange position. It is one of the most influential technology companies in the world, but it is not yet profitable. It needs to keep raising money to train bigger models, which means it needs to keep impressing investors, which means it needs to keep shipping products. That cycle creates pressure to move fast, and moving fast with AI has risks that are hard to quantify.
I do not think OpenAI is a villain in this story. I also do not think the original nonprofit mission survived contact with the economics of building frontier AI. The reality is somewhere in between, and it is worth paying attention to because the outcome affects all of us.
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