For more on the company’s partnership history, see TIME’s coverage: OpenAI Reorganizes With $135 Billion Microsoft Stake.
OpenAI non-profit Foundation to Target Health and AI Resilience
The newly created OpenAI Foundation will direct $25 billion toward two main goals:
- Health and disease cures — advancing medical breakthroughs using AI.
- Technical solutions to AI resilience — improving system safety and robustness.
This initiative revives OpenAI’s original 2015 nonprofit vision to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity as a whole.
A Controversial Journey from Nonprofit to For-Profit
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, OpenAI shifted in 2019 to a “capped-profit” model before fully embracing a for-profit structure in 2024. The change has not been without controversy—most notably, Elon Musk, a co-founder, sued OpenAI earlier this year, alleging that the company had “abandoned its non-profit mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity.” (An OpenAI Timeline: Musk, Altman, and the For-Profit Shift).
