Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, primarily by attempting to build safe AGI and share the benefits with the world.
We’veexperiencedfirsthandthat the most dramatic AI systems use the mostcomputational powerin addition to algorithmic innovations, and decided to scale much faster than we’d planned when starting OpenAI. We’ll need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.
We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission, and no pre-existing legal structure we know of strikes the right balance. Our solution is to create OpenAI LP as a hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit—which we are calling a “capped-profit”company.
The fundamental idea of OpenAI LP is that investors and employees can get a capped return if we succeed at our mission, which allows us to raise investment capital and attract employees with startup-like equity. But any returns beyond that amount—and if we are successful, we expect to generate orders of magnitude more value than we’d owe to people who invest in or work at OpenAI LP—are owned by the original OpenAI Nonprofit entity.
Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), “OpenAI” refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff), and the original entity is referred to as “OpenAI Nonprofit.”
## The mission comes first
We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission—ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI—ahead of generating returns for investors.
The mission comes first even with respect to OpenAI LP’s structure. While we are hopeful that what we describe below will work until our mission is complete, we may update our implementation as the world changes. Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed—legally and personally—to our mission.
OpenAI LP’s primary fiduciary obligation is to advance the aims of theOpenAI Charter, and the company is controlled by OpenAI Nonprofit’s board. All investors and employees sign agreements that OpenAI LP’s obligation to the Charter always comes first, even at the expense of some or all of their financial stake.
Our employee and investor paperwork start with big purple boxes like this. The general partner refers to OpenAI Nonprofit (whose legal name is “OpenAI Inc”); limited partners refers to investors and employees.
Only a minority of board members are allowed to hold financial stakes in the partnership at one time. Furthermore, only board members without such stakes can vote on decisions where the interests of limited partners and OpenAI Nonprofit’s mission may conflict—including any decisions about making payouts to investors and employees.
Another provision from our paperwork specifies that OpenAI Nonprofit retains control.
As mentioned above, economic returns for investors and employees are capped (with the cap negotiated in advance on a per-limited partner basis). Any excess returns go to OpenAI Nonprofit. Our goal is to ensure that most of the value (monetary or otherwise) we create if successful benefits everyone, so we think this is an important first step. Returns for our first round of investors are capped at 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in front of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds as we make further progress.
Our day-to-day work is not changing. Today, we believe we can build the most value by focusing exclusively on developing new AI technologies, not commercial products. Our structure gives us flexibility for how to create a return in the long term, but we hope to figure that out only once we’ve created safe AGI.
OpenAI LP currently employs around 100 people organized into three main areas: capabilities (advancing what AI systems can do), safety (ensuring those systems are aligned with human values), and policy (ensuring appropriate governance for such systems). OpenAI Nonprofit governs OpenAI LP, runs educational programs such asScholarsandFellows, and hosts policy initiatives. OpenAI LP is continuing (at increased pace and scale) the development roadmap started at OpenAI Nonprofit, which has yielded breakthroughs inreinforcement learning,robotics, andlanguage.
We are excited by the potential for AGI to help solve planetary-scale problems in areas where humanity is failing and there is no obvious solution today. However, we are also concerned about AGI’s potential to cause rapid change, whether through machines pursuing goals misspecified by their operator, malicious humans subverting deployed systems, or an out-of-control economy that grows without resulting in improvements to human lives. As described in ourCharter, we are willing to merge with a value-aligned organization (even if it means reduced or zero payouts to investors) to avoid a competitive race which would make it hard to prioritize safety.
_We are traveling a hard and uncertain path, but we have designed our structure to help us positively affect the world should we succeed in creating AGI—which we think will have as broad impact as the computer itself and improve healthcare, education, scientific research, and many aspects of people’s lives. If you’d like to help us make this mission a reality, we’re__hiring__:)!_
1. A This list represents the board as of March 11, 2019 and does not reflect further board member updates.
Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI
View all company articles
Global news partnerships: Le Monde and Prisa Media Company Mar 13, 2024
OpenAI announces new members to board of directors Company Mar 8, 2024
Review completed & Altman, Brockman to continue to lead OpenAI Company Mar 8, 2024
Our Research * Research Index * Research Overview * Research Residency * OpenAI for Science * Economic Research
Latest Advancements * GPT-5.3 Instant * GPT-5.3-Codex * GPT-5 * Codex
Safety * Safety Approach * Security & Privacy * Trust & Transparency
ChatGPT * Explore ChatGPT(opens in a new window) * Business * Enterprise * Education * Pricing(opens in a new window) * Download(opens in a new window)
Sora * Sora Overview * Features * Pricing * Sora log in(opens in a new window)
API Platform * Platform Overview * Pricing * API log in(opens in a new window) * Documentation(opens in a new window) * Developer Forum(opens in a new window)
For Business * Business Overview * Solutions * Contact Sales
Company * About Us * Our Charter * Foundation * Careers * Brand
Support * Help Center(opens in a new window)
More * News * Stories * Livestreams * Podcast * RSS
Terms & Policies * Terms of Use * Privacy Policy * Other Policies
(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)
OpenAI © 2015–2026 Manage Cookies
English United States
