OpenAI Foundation pledges $1B in grants to ensure AI 'benefits all of humanity'

The OpenAI logo is displayed on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen with output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its flagship product ChatGPT, pledged Tuesday to grant out US$1 billion over the next year and to build up its capacity as a philanthropic funder.

The pledge represents a major development in OpenAI’s philanthropic activities and offers insight into how the company, which started as a nonprofit, plans to carry out its charitable mission to develop AI to benefit “all of humanity.”

“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives — while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement Tuesday.

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The new funding will support life science and health research and will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, especially of children, the nonprofit said. It follows a commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes that OpenAI Foundation made in October, though without providing a time frame.

OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking, it said.

Ups and downs in OpenAI’s nonprofit activities

OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but has sought to escape that structure over the past several years as it built out its commercial technologies like ChatGPT and its for-profit subsidiary, which is now one of the most highly valued startups in the world.

In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that left the nonprofit’s board in charge of its for-profit business but eased the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies. The deal also clarified the nonprofit’s ownership stake in the company, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced nonprofits in the country.

Since the incorporation of its for-profit business in 2019, OpenAI’s nonprofit significantly scaled back its activities, going from listing $51 million in expenses in 2018 to $3.3 million the following year, according to its public tax filings. In 2024, the most recent year that the nonprofit reported its activities to the Internal Revenue Service, OpenAI’s nonprofit received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.

Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting and public affairs at The Ohio State University who specializes in nonprofits, cautioned that the tax forms were not well suited to capture OpenAI’s activities and the extent to which they were focused on achieving its charitable mission.

“People tend to focus on the financial part of that,” said Mittendorf in an email. ”Is the immense value creation being used to further a charitable objective? But an equally important piece is whether the product they are developing is serving humanity as they envisioned.”

It’s a question that Elon Musk, an early financial backer of OpenAI, has also raised. Musk sued the company, claiming that CEO Sam Altman and others betrayed the nonprofit’s mission in pursuit of profit in a case that will go to trial in California.

Recent revision to nonprofit’s role

In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business.

The advisory board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grant making.

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The nonprofit announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity.

OpenAI’s new vision for its charitable grantmaking comes at the same time that communities around the country worry about data centers increasing electricity costs, lawsuits accuse AI chatbots of exacerbating mental health crises, and companies and advocates question the fitness of new AI technologies to be used in war.

In addition to hiring a new director, OpenAI Foundation said Wojciech Zaremba, one of a handful of OpenAI co-founders still working for the company, will become the foundation’s head of AI resilience, which is focused on the “new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI.”

Additionally, the nonprofit has brought on Jacob Trefethen to lead its life sciences and health grantmaking. Trefethen led a similar portfolio at the philanthropic organization, Coefficient Giving, which is a major funder of the effective altruism community that has sometimes clashed with OpenAI’s vision for artificial intelligence.

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

Thalia Beaty, The Associated Press