OpenAI is keeping the non-profit, transitioning the for-profit side to a public benefit corporation (PBC). Sam Altman writing on the OpenAI site:
We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity, which currently requires hundreds of billions of dollars and may eventually require trillions of dollars. We believe this is the best way for us to fulfill our mission and to get people to create massive benefits for each other with these new tools.
We want our nonprofit to be the largest and most effective nonprofit in history that will be focused on using AI to enable the highest-leverage outcomes for people.
This all seems like a good pivot on the rumored plan. The change also does away with the “capped profit” structure, so presumably investors are happy.
We might see a little more transparency too, since there are rules for how public benefit corporations should report on the progress of their mission to shareholders. I also discovered today that Anthropic has a separate trust that has oversight over Anthropic’s own PBC.
