OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
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OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
The organization has a complex corporate structure. As of April 2025, it is led by the non-profit OpenAI, Inc., registered in Delaware, and has multiple for-profit subsidiaries including OpenAI Holdings, LLC and OpenAI Global, LLC. Microsoft has invested US$13 billion in OpenAI, and is entitled to 49% of OpenAI Global, LLC's profits, capped at an estimated 10x their investment. Microsoft also provides computing resources to OpenAI through its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.
In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits for alleged copyright infringement against authors and media companies whose work was used to train some of OpenAI's products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's prominent role in an industry-wide problem.