As it prepares to transition from a nonprofit corporation to a for-profit, OpenAI says it’s convening a group of experts to “help OpenAI’s philanthropy understand the most urgent and intractable problems nonprofits face today.”
This group, which OpenAI says will incorporate feedback from “leaders and communities” in health, science, education, and public services, particularly within OpenAI’s home state of California, will be announced in April and submit insights to OpenAI’s board of directors in the next 90 days.
“[T]he Board will consider these insights in its ongoing work to evolve the OpenAI nonprofit well before the end of 2025,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “The Board recognizes the importance of engaging with the philanthropic community and those closest to the work to help inform how OpenAI’s philanthropy can best deploy its potentially historic resources.”
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab. But as its experiments became increasingly capital intensive, it created its current structure, taking on outside investments from VCs and companies, including Microsoft.
OpenAI today has a for-profit org controlled by a nonprofit, with a “capped profit” share for investors and employees. But as alluded to in the blog post, the company’s intention is to transition its existing for-profit into a traditional corporation, with ordinary shares of stock. The nonprofit would receive billions of dollars to cede control.
The stakes are high for OpenAI to complete the conversion expeditiously. If it isn’t successful by the end of the year, at least one of its backers, SoftBank, could claw back billions of dollars in pledged capital.