Founding of the nonprofit AI research lab
Blog PostOpenAI's founding announcement as a nonprofit AI research company with $1B in committed funding, pledging to develop AI that benefits humanity and to publish its research openly.
The founding thesis rested on several pillars: AI should benefit all of humanity, not a single corporation. Research should be published openly (the "Open" in OpenAI). Safety should be a first-class concern from day one. And having a nonprofit structure would ensure mission alignment over profit motive.
The name "OpenAI" was a deliberate contrast to the closed nature of AI research at the time. The founding team believed that broad access to AI research was itself a safety mechanism — if many researchers could scrutinize and build on each other's work, it would be harder for any single dangerous system to go unnoticed.