OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
The organization has a complex corporate structure. As of October 2025, it is led by the non-profit OpenAI Foundation, founded in 2015 and registered in Delaware, which holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI Group PBC, a for-profit public benefit corporation which commercializes its products. Microsoft invested over $13 billion into OpenAI, and provides Azure cloud computing resources. In October 2025, OpenAI conducted a $6.6 billion share sale that valued the company at $500 billion. On 28 October 2025, OpenAI said it had converted its main business into a for-profit corporation, with Microsoft acquiring a 27% stake in the company and the remaining non-profit company (now known as the OpenAI Foundation) owning a 26% stake.