History of OpenAI

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit AI research company on Dec 11, 2015, added a capped-profit arm in 2019, partnered with Microsoft, released ChatGPT in 2022 and became OpenAI Group PBC under the OpenAI Foundation on Oct 28, 2025.

OpenAI was founded on Dec 11, 2015 as "a non-profit artificial intelligence research company", with Ilya Sutskever as research director, Greg Brockman as CTO and Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, backed by funders who "have committed $1 billion". Ten years later it is OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, maker of ChatGPT, Codex and the GPT-6 models. Between those points came the GPT papers, a capped-profit company in 2019, three rounds of Microsoft investment, ChatGPT, a leadership crisis in November 2023 and a recapitalization in October 2025.

Quick facts

Founded	Dec 11, 2015, as a nonprofit
Founding leaders	Ilya Sutskever (research director), Greg Brockman (CTO), Sam Altman and Elon Musk (co-chairs)
Capped-profit arm	OpenAI LP, Mar 11, 2019
Microsoft partnership	Since 2019
ChatGPT	Nov 30, 2022
Structure today	OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC, since Oct 28, 2025
Last valuation	$852 billion post-money, Mar 31, 2026, as CNBC reported

Founding as a nonprofit (2015)

OpenAI's first post named its founding members: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba, beside Sutskever and Brockman, who had been CTO of Stripe. Its funders included Altman, Brockman, Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, Infosys and YC Research (OpenAI). The company was a research lab; it had no product for its first years.

The GPT papers (2018 to 2020)

On Jun 11, 2018 OpenAI showed that a Transformer pretrained on unlabeled text, then fine-tuned on small labeled sets, set new results on reading and commonsense tests: the approach later called GPT-1. On Feb 14, 2019 came GPT-2, 1.5 billion parameters trained on 40GB of internet text from 8 million web pages, which OpenAI released in stages rather than all at once because of misuse concerns; the full model followed on Nov 5, 2019. The GPT-3 paper, describing a 175 billion parameter model, was posted on May 28, 2020, and the OpenAI API opened on Jun 11, 2020, OpenAI's first commercial product. The full model line is on GPT Model History.

OpenAI LP and Microsoft (2019 to 2023)

On Mar 11, 2019 OpenAI created OpenAI LP, a "capped-profit" company under the nonprofit: first-round investors could earn at most 100 times their investment, with lower multiples expected later. On Jul 22, 2019 Microsoft invested $1 billion and OpenAI moved its services to Azure. Microsoft announced a further "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment" on Jan 23, 2023, with Azure as OpenAI's "exclusive cloud provider". CNBC later put Microsoft's total at more than $13 billion as of late 2025.

Codex, DALL-E and InstructGPT (2021 and 2022)

In 2021 OpenAI moved beyond text. DALL-E (Jan 5, 2021) made images from text, and Codex (Aug 10, 2021), a GPT-3 descendant trained on code, powered GitHub Copilot. InstructGPT (Mar 4, 2022) trained models to follow instructions with human feedback, and human raters preferred its 1.3 billion parameter version to the 175 billion parameter GPT-3. That method led straight to ChatGPT. See DALL-E and Codex.

ChatGPT and GPT-4 (2022 and 2023)

ChatGPT launched on Nov 30, 2022 as a free research preview and turned OpenAI into a consumer company. GPT-4 followed on Mar 14, 2023, scoring around the top 10% of test takers on a simulated bar exam, per its technical report. The product's own timeline is on History of ChatGPT.

The November 2023 board crisis

On Nov 17, 2023 OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, saying he "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and named CTO Mira Murati interim CEO. Greg Brockman lost his post as board chair; CNBC reported the same day that he quit the company. Twelve days later, on Nov 29, 2023, OpenAI confirmed Altman's return as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo, a non-voting observer seat for Microsoft, and Murati back as CTO. An outside review ended on Mar 8, 2024 with the announcement that Altman and Brockman would continue to lead OpenAI.

Stargate, io and the recapitalization (2025)

Stargate: announced at the White House on Jan 21, 2025, a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build AI data centers, with $100 billion at first and up to $500 billion over four years, starting in Texas, with Masayoshi Son as chairman.
io: on May 21, 2025 OpenAI said the team of io, the hardware company Jony Ive founded a year earlier, would merge with OpenAI, with Ive and LoveFrom taking on design work across OpenAI; the merger was official on Jul 9, 2025. No OpenAI page read for this article names a device, price or ship date.
Recapitalization: on Oct 28, 2025 the for-profit became OpenAI Group PBC, controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, which held 26%; Microsoft held about 27%, worth about $135 billion; employees and investors held 47%. The attorneys general of California and Delaware let it proceed under conditions. Microsoft's IP rights now run through 2032, and OpenAI contracted an extra $250 billion of Azure.

2026: record funding, cuts and GPT-6

On Mar 31, 2026 OpenAI closed $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation, with up to $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia and $30 billion from SoftBank; it reported $2 billion of revenue a month. It also narrowed its products: Sora closed in April and its API in September, a decision OpenAI tied to compute priorities, and ChatGPT Atlas, ChatGPT Pulse and Group Chats were retired over the summer. On Sep 3, 2026 OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which its own system card calls its first model at the "Critical" level of cybersecurity capability; CNBC reported the same day that OpenAI had confidentially filed for an IPO in June 2026 and that CFO Sarah Friar told staff it "will be a public company in 2027". OpenAI's position today is on OpenAI.

Frequently asked questions

When was OpenAI founded? OpenAI was founded on Dec 11, 2015, as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company, with $1 billion committed by funders including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.

Who founded OpenAI? OpenAI's founding post names Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman as its leaders, Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, and Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba as founding members.

Why was Sam Altman fired from OpenAI? On Nov 17, 2023, OpenAI's board said Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" and that it had lost confidence in him. He returned as CEO on Nov 29, 2023 with a new board.

Is OpenAI still a nonprofit? Partly. Since Oct 28, 2025, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC, a for-profit public benefit corporation, and held 26% of it at the recapitalization.

When did OpenAI release GPT-1? OpenAI published the work later called GPT-1 on Jun 11, 2018. GPT-2 followed on Feb 14, 2019 and GPT-3's paper on May 28, 2020.

Is OpenAI going public? CNBC reported on Sep 3, 2026 that OpenAI had confidentially filed its IPO paperwork in June 2026 and that its CFO told staff it will be a public company in 2027. As of Nov 6, 2026, it is not listed.