OpenAI completes transition to a public benefit corporation

The AI lab is now a less regulated $500 billion public benefit corporation, controlled by a non-profit arm with about $130 billion in equity.

The new governance makes it possible for them to reach for a market debut at some time in the future, and unlocks the investment of some $30 billion from SoftBank, which was contingent on the regulatory change.

Microsoft holds 27%
Other investments may now follow, and Microsoft has revealed that it now holds some 27% of the new company, or $136 billion, with OpenAI promising to spend some $250 billion on its cloud service.

A public benefit corporation is a for-profit company structure, but with a commitment to a specific purpose, which must be considered alongside shareholder value. It must publish a yearly «public benefit» report to its purpose — in this case «ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.»

Little will actually change as the process concludes, other than opening up to new investments, and the creation of the controlling non-profit.

Huge non-profit
This non-profit entity will be called the OpenAI Foundation and will focus on philanthropy in addition to controlling the for-profit entity — and will initially invest $25 billion in two specific areas.

The first one is to fund the acceleration of health breakthroughs through AI, so «everyone can benefit from faster diagnostics, better treatments, and cures.» They say this means creating open sourced health datasets and funding for scientists.

The second is «cybersecurity for AI,» which will be needed as AI capabilities increase and become more widely used. They say they will build out «practical technical solutions for AI resilience.»

It will be one of the world’s best-funded non-profits and one of the biggest philanthropies on the globe in pure dollar terms.

Jakub and I are going to do a livestream and answer questions today at 10:30 am pacific.

We have a lot of things to talk about–of course we will cover our new corporate structure, but we will also discuss our new goals for research, the evolution of our product offerings, an…

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 28, 2025

There was a livestream announcing the changes at OpenAI, which is still up.

Read more: OpenAI’s statement, Microsoft’s statement. Writeups at The Guardian and TechCrunch.