OpenAI is the company that launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and, in doing so, defined the modern consumer AI era. It's the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world, the primary creator of the GPT and o-series model families, and the counterparty in the largest cloud partnership in AI (with Microsoft).
This page is the living reference to OpenAI as a company — its history, leadership, products, funding, controversies, and every story we publish tagged OpenAI. We update it whenever OpenAI ships a meaningful change.
For product pages, see our ChatGPT hub and Sora hub. This page covers the company itself.
We rated OpenAI 4.7 / 5. OpenAI is the default AI platform for most production deployments. The API is mature, the model family covers every modality, and the developer tooling is the most polished in the market. Pricing is no longer best-in-class for every model — but for breadth, it still wins.
Read the full OpenAI review →Latest news about OpenAI
Every story we've published tagged OpenAI. Refreshed automatically every time the newsroom publishes.
- Aug 25, 2026OpenAI's Thibault Sottiaux on ChatGPT Work hitting 20M usersThe head of core products defends the $20 Plus plan, an 80% price cut with Luna, and the bet that workers want the model to just take over.
- Aug 25, 2026OpenAI's Jalapeño inference chip beats Nvidia Blackwell on SemiAnalysis benchmarkThe Broadcom-partnered chip ships in small volumes at the end of 2026, with broader deployment in 2027.
- Aug 25, 2026Gamma acquires Accel-backed Lica to build an AI design research labLica's co-founders will lead Gamma's new research division, tasked with reinventing what a presentation looks like beyond the slide.
- Aug 24, 2026OpenAI bets ChatGPT Work can bring agents to the other 99%Codex reaches 98% of OpenAI staff but under 1% of individual subscribers. ChatGPT Work is the company's fix.
- Aug 24, 2026Cheshire Academy uses a traffic-light system to govern AI use in classThe 400-student Connecticut boarding school labels every assignment green, yellow, or red — and lets teachers pick the tools.
- Aug 24, 2026Children learn language on 100M words. LLMs need 100,000x moreThe data efficiency gap between toddlers and frontier models is now the defining puzzle for both cognitive science and AI research.
Timeline of major releases
- Dec 11, 2015OpenAI foundedSam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others launch OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab focused on "safe AGI."
- Mar 11, 2019Capped-profit conversionOpenAI restructures, creating a capped-profit subsidiary to raise capital. Microsoft invests $1B shortly after.
- Nov 30, 2022ChatGPT launchesOpenAI ships ChatGPT as a research preview. The product hits 100M users within two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history.
- Nov 17, 2023Sam Altman fired and reinstatedThe board fires Altman; employees threaten mass resignation; Altman returns five days later. The incident triggers ongoing governance changes.
- Feb 15, 2024Sora announcedOpenAI previews Sora, a text-to-video model. Public release follows in December 2024.
- May 13, 2024GPT-4o and voice modeOpenAI ships GPT-4o (omnimodel) with real-time voice. Scarlett Johansson controversy over the "Sky" voice follows.
- Sep 12, 2024o1 reasoning modelsOpenAI launches the o1 family — chain-of-thought reasoning models that inference-time-scale to much harder problems. The "test-time compute" era begins.
- Aug 7, 2025GPT-5 launchesOpenAI ships GPT-5 with auto-routing between reasoning and fast tiers. Rolled out to all 800M weekly ChatGPT users simultaneously.
- Oct 29, 2025For-profit restructure completedOpenAI completes its transition to a Public Benefit Corporation, with the nonprofit retaining equity valued at ~$130B. Microsoft's stake and rights updated.
- Apr 3, 2026GPT-5.1 and agent platform maturationOpenAI ships GPT-5.1 with improved reasoning, deeper agent tool use, and the first production-ready Operator agent for enterprise workflows.
How to access OpenAI
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Free | $0 | GPT-5 basic access, rate-limited. |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/mo | GPT-5 priority access, image generation, voice mode, Projects. |
| ChatGPT Pro | $200/mo | GPT-5 Pro (unlimited), o-series reasoning at highest tier, Sora video with priority, Operator agent. |
| ChatGPT Team | $25–30/user/mo | Shared workspace, admin controls, data excluded from training. |
| ChatGPT Enterprise | Custom | SSO, domain verification, enterprise compliance, unlimited GPT-5. |
| API / Platform | Usage-based | GPT-5, o-series, embeddings, fine-tuning, Assistants, Realtime, Sora API, Whisper. |
OpenAI vs. Anthropic
| Feature | OpenAI | Anthropic |
|---|---|---|
| Flagship chatbot | ChatGPT | Claude |
| Frontier model | GPT-5 Pro | Claude Opus 4.7 |
| Weekly active users (latest disclosed) | 800M+ | ~150M (Claude) |
| Enterprise annualized revenue (est.) | ~$4B+ | ~$2B+ |
| Cloud partner | Microsoft Azure (primary) | AWS + Google Cloud |
| Governance structure | PBC subsidiary of nonprofit | PBC with Long-Term Benefit Trust |
History and governance
OpenAI began in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab with a stated mission to build safe artificial general intelligence. That governance choice — nonprofit with capped-profit commercial arm, unusual mission-protection clauses in the operating agreement, a board charged with prioritizing the mission over shareholder return — has shaped nearly every high-profile OpenAI event since, including the November 2023 board crisis that briefly saw Sam Altman fired and returned five days later.
In October 2025, OpenAI completed a long-telegraphed restructure into a Public Benefit Corporation, with the nonprofit retaining significant equity (publicly reported around $130B in implied value) but the operational entity now a conventional for-profit with PBC mission constraints. The restructure resolved a long period of legal and governance uncertainty and unlocked the most recent funding round.
Product portfolio
OpenAI ships products across four surfaces: consumer (ChatGPT, Sora), developer platform (API for GPT-5, o-series, Sora API, embeddings, fine-tuning), enterprise (ChatGPT Enterprise, Team, custom deployments), and the emerging agent category (Operator, Codex). ChatGPT remains the dominant revenue driver, with subscriptions increasingly supplemented by agent-usage pricing.
The API platform is less visible to consumers but critical strategically — it's the layer that Microsoft Copilot, thousands of startups, and a growing list of enterprises build on. Any meaningful shift in OpenAI's API roadmap affects a substantial fraction of the AI app economy.
Research and safety
OpenAI maintains a substantial research organization whose output shapes industry priorities — instruction tuning, RLHF, constitutional fine-tuning, chain-of-thought reasoning (shipped as o1 and refined through the o-series), and the ongoing scaling of test-time compute via agent architectures. The safety team operates under the Preparedness Framework, with capabilities evaluations tied to deployment decisions.
Safety at OpenAI has been contentious. Several high-profile researchers have left citing concerns about pace-vs-safety trade-offs. Subsequent reorganizations have reworked the alignment function more than once. The ongoing industry debate about whether frontier labs should self-regulate, accept third-party evals, or defer to forthcoming government frameworks is one OpenAI sits at the center of.
The Microsoft relationship
Microsoft has invested on the order of $13–14B in OpenAI across multiple rounds since 2019, and is OpenAI's primary cloud and strategic partner. ChatGPT and the OpenAI API run predominantly on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has broad rights to embed OpenAI technology inside Microsoft products (Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Bing) and a defined path to technology access subject to some carve-outs around AGI declarations.
The relationship has been renegotiated repeatedly as OpenAI's scale and bargaining position have shifted. As of 2026, Microsoft remains the preferred partner but with less exclusivity than the original 2019 deal contemplated — OpenAI's own Stargate supercomputing project and multi-cloud ambitions mean Microsoft is no longer the sole capacity provider.
Where OpenAI sits in the 2026 landscape
OpenAI is still the consumer AI category leader by a wide margin — ChatGPT's 800M+ weekly users is multiple times the next closest competitor. On the developer platform, it's neck-and-neck with Anthropic for frontier-API mindshare. On enterprise, Microsoft's distribution amplifies OpenAI's reach but also creates channel conflict — some enterprises prefer to buy Copilot (Microsoft terms) rather than ChatGPT Enterprise (OpenAI terms).
The open questions for OpenAI in 2026 are the same as for the category: agent monetization, enterprise lock-in, the durability of the Microsoft partnership, and whether frontier model progress continues on the current curve or plateaus.
Our coverage
Everything tagged OpenAI appears in Latest news above. For OpenAI product pages, see our ChatGPT and Sora hubs. For the main competitor, see Anthropic. For broader industry context, see our AI news and AI business beats.
