OpenAI is an American 📝Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and deployment company founded in December 2015 and headquartered in 📝San Francisco, CA, best known as the maker of 📝ChatGPT and the 📝GPT family of models. It is led by chief executive 📝Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, who co-founded it as a nonprofit alongside 📝Elon Musk, 📝Ilya Sutskever, and others. Since October 2025 its business has operated as OpenAI Group PBC, a 📝Public-benefit corporation controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, with a stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI adopted a capped-profit structure in 2019 to raise outside capital, most prominently from 📝Microsoft, and its November 2022 release of ChatGPT set off the generative AI boom. In November 2023 its board briefly removed Altman as CEO before reinstating him five days later after nearly all staff threatened to resign, and in 2024 several senior safety researchers, including Sutskever, left the company. It recapitalized as a PBC in October 2025, launched the GPT-6 family in September 2026, and raised capital at an $852 billion valuation, though Altman has said it will not go public before 2027.
Models
OpenAI's models span several families; every release is indexed in the 📝OpenAI Model Glossary. Status as of September 28, 2026:
- GPT-6 — GPT-6 Astra (Sept 3, 2026), OpenAI's most capable model, plus GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna (Sept 22, 2026) for everyday and high-volume work.
- GPT-5 generation — from 📝GPT-5 (Aug 2025) through 📝GPT-5.5 to GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna (July 2026), the first OpenAI family with named capability tiers.
- o-series — reasoning models from o1 (2024) to o3-pro (2025), now folded into the GPT-5 line and being retired from the API.
- Specialized — GPT-5.6-Cyber for vetted security teams and GPT-Rosalind for life-sciences research, both behind trusted access.
- Media — GPT Image 2.5, the GPT-Live-1 voice models, and 📝Whisper (OpenAI); 📝Sora video generation was discontinued in 2026.
- Open-weight — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b (Aug 2025), its first open-weight language models since GPT-2.
Products
- 📝ChatGPT — OpenAI's consumer and workplace assistant, the product that made generative AI mainstream.
- 📝Codex — OpenAI's coding agent, spanning an open-source CLI (April 2025) and a cloud agent that reached general availability in October 2025.
- 📝ChatGPT Agent and 📝Deep Research (OpenAI) — agentic modes that browse, research, and complete multi-step tasks inside ChatGPT.
- 📝ChatGPT Apps — third-party applications that run inside ChatGPT conversations.
- ChatGPT Atlas — OpenAI's web browser with ChatGPT built in, launched October 21, 2025.
- 📝OpenAI Frontier — an enterprise platform for deploying and managing AI agents, announced February 2026.
- 📝AgentKit (OpenAI) and 📝ChatKit (OpenAI) — developer toolkits for building agents and chat interfaces, joined by the Agents API public beta in September 2026.
Structure and Programs
- Ownership — after the October 28, 2025 recapitalization, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation holds about 26% of OpenAI Group PBC and appoints its board, Microsoft holds about 27%, and employees and other investors hold the 📝rest.
- Stargate — a January 2025 joint venture with 📝Oracle, 📝SoftBank, and MGX to build up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the United States.
- Daybreak — OpenAI's trusted-access program for cybersecurity, with a Blue tier for defensive work and a Red tier for purpose-built cyber models; its counterpart at 📝Anthropic is 📝Project Glasswing.
- GPT-Rosalind access — a trusted-access program for qualified life-sciences organizations, launched with partners including Amgen, Moderna, and Thermo Fisher Scientific; compare the 📝Anthropic Life Sciences Verification Program.
Scale
- Latest funding: $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation, closed March 31, 2026, co-led by SoftBank, with 📝Amazon committing $50 billion and 📝NVIDIA and SoftBank $30 billion each; it included $3 billion from individual investors through bank channels. Sources: OpenAI, CNBC.
- Revenue: $13.1 billion in 2025, and about $2 billion per month as of March 2026.
- IPO: on September 12, 2026, Altman said OpenAI would not go public in 2026, calling it an "ill-advised moment" given AI safety concerns. Source: Fortune.