OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the non-profit OpenAI Incorporated and its for-profit subsidiary corporation OpenAI Limited Partnership. OpenAI conducts AI research with the declared intention of promoting and developing friendly AI.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members. Microsoft provided OpenAI LP with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023.

2015–2018: Non-profit beginnings

In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture. According an investigation led by TechCrunch, the non-profit's funding remains murky, with Musk its biggest funder while another donor, YC Research, did not contribute anything at all. The organization stated it would "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. OpenAI is headquartered at the Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco.

2019: Transition to for-profit

In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit capped at 100 times any investment. According to OpenAI, the capped-profit model allows OpenAI LP to legally attract investment from venture funds, and in addition, to grant employees stakes in the company, the goal being that they can say "I'm going to OpenAI, but in the long term it's not going to be disadvantageous to us as a family." Many top researchers work for Google Brain, DeepMind, or Facebook, which offer stock options that a nonprofit would be unable to. Prior to the transition, public disclosure of the compensation of top employees at OpenAI was legally required.