OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit and was announced publicly on 11 December 2015 as an artificial intelligence research company.^7, 8, 9

The announcement named Ilya Sutskever as research director, Greg Brockman, a former Stripe CTO, as CTO, and Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs, together with seven other founding members.^8, 9

Its stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.¹²

In June 2018 it published a transformer language model trained without labels and then fine-tuned for specific tasks, a line continued by GPT-2 in February 2019.^3, 4

It released the OpenAI API in June 2020 and introduced ChatGPT in November 2022.^5, 6

GPT-4, a multimodal model that accepts image and text inputs, followed in March 2023.¹⁵

In August 2025 the company released the open-weight gpt-oss models under the Apache 2.0 license, and it describes its other recent models as proprietary.¹³

On 28 October 2025 it announced a new structure in which the nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation and the for-profit became OpenAI Group PBC, which the Foundation controls.^7, 12

In September 2026 the GPT-6 family, which began with GPT-6 Astra, was expanded with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, and the API model guide now also lists GPT-6.1 Sol.^16, 17

As of September 2026, Sam Altman is chief executive, and the operating company OpenAI OpCo, LLC has its registered office in San Francisco.^{1, 2, 10, 11}

For API customers outside Europe the contracting entity is OpenAI OpCo, LLC under California law, and eligible customers can choose US or EU data residency.^2, 14