Those who are still thinking about OpenAI as an altruistic experiment can’t be any more wrong. Today, it’s in fact a profit-driven “empire.” Founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, OpenAI initially presented itself as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity.

So, that’s how things started. But merely eighteen months into the project, the leadership realized the path to AGI would require astronomical sums of money. The nonprofit model could not guarantee success, and this financial pressure triggered a rift between Musk and Altman, prompting Musk to depart in 2018.

Under Altman’s leadership, the company reformulated its legal structure. It led to the creation of a “capped-profit” arm, OpenAI LP, in order to raise capital and commercialize products. After this step, Microsoft invested $1 billion, but it also signaled that the lab had moved away from its original ideas. Inside the company, the move was called “Oregon Trail.”

The new for-profit branch used the name “SummerSafe LP,” a reference to a Rick and Morty episode about a system that becomes dangerously overprotective. This change pushed OpenAI into a race to compete faster, so they began to share less research and focus more on products like ChatGPT to keep investors happy.

By 2023, OpenAI had become everything it initially sought to counter. The final proof of it was the firing of Altman in November 2023. It signified that the nonprofit board eventually buckled under the influence of moneyed interests. Even the most sincere scientific goals can be taken over by money and ideology, giving more power to a small group of tech elites. In OpenAI’s case, a goal of helping everyone was replaced by fierce competition, and a desire to share knowledge turned into an obsession to become the top player. By 2025, OpenAI had fully embraced its corporate trajectory, planning a transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation where the original nonprofit would merely hold a minority stake.