OpenAI describes itself as an AI research and deployment company, with the stated mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It glosses that term as AI systems that are generally smarter than humans. Its about page leads with that mission and links out from it to a statement of the organization’s plan for AGI and to its Charter.
The organization is structured in two parts. The nonprofit OpenAI Foundation governs the for-profit OpenAI Group, which operates as a public benefit corporation, and OpenAI states that its mission advances through the combined impact of both. It also says that it is building safe and beneficial AGI, while adding that it would consider its mission fulfilled if its work aided others in achieving that outcome.
History
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit. In 2019 it created a for-profit subsidiary, which it says was done to scale its research and deployment efforts and which it states has always been governed and controlled by the nonprofit.
Its current arrangement dates from a recapitalization announced on 28 October 2025. Under it the nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation and the for-profit became OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation — a form OpenAI describes as required, unlike a conventional corporation, to advance its stated mission and consider the broader interests of all stakeholders. OpenAI states that the Foundation continues to control the Group and that the two share the same mission, and says the change was completed after nearly a year of dialogue with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware.
Governance of the Group’s board runs through the Foundation, which OpenAI says holds special voting and governance rights allowing it to appoint all of the Group’s directors and replace them at any time. Oversight of safety and security practices across the whole of OpenAI, including the Group, sits with a Safety and Security Committee that remains a committee of the Foundation.
Activities & Products
OpenAI presents its work under two headings, research and products. Its own product listing names ChatGPT in its consumer, business, enterprise and education forms together with OpenAI Codex, and lists an API platform for developers separately from those.