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

When Sam Altman first advised her that he’d by no means let OpenAI go company, that what he and his colleagues had 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 book she was writing concerning the risks of enterprise capital. It was earlier than Altman’s mysterious firing and unfiring a yr later, after which he largely 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 way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” — has been publicly making an attempt to flee the confines of its charitable roots. At this time, OpenAI comprises each a company arm targeted 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 technique of making an attempt to fully sever the 2 in 2024, OpenAI lost about half of its AI security staffers and far of its senior leadership. That was adopted by an intensified scrutiny from state attorneys general, nonprofit legal experts, competitor companies, effective altruists, Nobel Prize winners, huge swaths of California’s philanthropic community, and one among its authentic funders, Elon Musk. Completely different sides had totally different pursuits, however the general argument was that shifting to a for-profit mannequin would create a fiduciary obligation to buyers that may inherently conflict with its authentic mission of security and public profit.

Nonetheless, OpenAI did lastly strike a contortive restructuring deal final October. Primarily, the for-profit arm grew to become what is named a public profit company (PBC), known as the OpenAI Group. The unique nonprofit grew to become the OpenAI Basis, which has a 26 percent stake currently worth $180 billion within the PBC, plus a sliver of unique authorized management over sure main choices.

One impact of the transition was that it basically 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 straight 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 words, the “best-equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen.” On paper, a minimum of, the muse is now considerably richer than the entire country 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 necessary to notice that a lot 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 will 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 common intelligence advantages all of humanity,” it’s unsure {that a} socially helpful philanthropy can exist aspect by aspect with an organization that’s preventing 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 stated. “These two entities can’t reside underneath 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 unbiased.)

The muse’s first items got here within the type of $40.5 million in no-strings-attached grants to over 200 neighborhood 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 vital of OpenAI’s privatization that fashioned 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 improvement. On Feb. 19, OpenAI — the corporate, not the muse — introduced a $7.5 million grant along side Microsoft, Anthropic, Amazon, and different main tech corporations for a new, international project aimed toward researching learn how to make AI programs safer.