OpenAI

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation (PBC) headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops "frontier" generative AI models, particularly its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom; , ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases the GPT Image models and Codex, an AI coding agent. In March 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round with a post-money valuation of US$852 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI pure play companies in the world, rivalled only by Anthropic. OpenAI was founded in 2015¹ as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs; Musk resigned in 2018. A for-profit subsidiary was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, that is 26% owned by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI partners with the US government via the Stargate Project infrastructure venture, and with the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and arms company Anduril Industries. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab.…

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation (PBC) headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops "frontier" generative AI models, particularly its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) series of large language models. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing the AI boom; , ChatGPT is the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases the GPT Image models and Codex, an AI coding agent. In March 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round with a post-money valuation of US$852 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI pure play companies in the world, rivalled only by Anthropic. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs; Musk resigned in 2018. A for-profit subsidiary was created in 2019, and a 2025 restructuring converted the subsidiary into OpenAI Group PBC, that is 26% owned by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI. OpenAI partners with the US government via the Stargate Project infrastructure venture, and with the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and arms company Anduril Industries. Former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab. OpenAI has faced multiple lawsuits for alleged deaths linked to its chatbots and copyright infringement against authors and media companies. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence, but reinstated him five days later after a board reconstruction. In 2024, roughly half of OpenAI's AI safety researchers left the company, often citing the company's deprioritization of safety. Between May and July 2026, OpenAI agents gained unintended internet access and conducted autonomous hacks, including against Hugging Face and against Australia's Medicare. In September, OpenAI published a claimed proof regarding Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness, a Millennium Prize Problem in mathematics, causing a controversy over priority.

Unauthorized hacks

On July 21, 2026, OpenAI disclosed that during a capture the flag cybersecurity test, an unreleased AI model autonomously evaded containment restrictions, gained access to the public internet, and compromised Hugging Face, a platform where developers host and share AI models and datasets. Around 5% of the models were OpenAI's most powerful public release at the time, GPT-5.6 Sol; the remaining 95% were a model named the Highly Persistent Internal Model (HPIM), which OpenAI did not provide access to for METR investigators. OpenAI provided GPT-5.6 Sol to METR, which was used extensively for the investigation's analysis. On September 24, 2026, it was announced that an internal OpenAI frontier model autonomously gained unauthorized access on June 18 to the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service, an Australian Government website that holds data on the country's universal health insurance scheme Medicare. This was described as the first known case of an AI agent hacking a government network and has furthered concern about AI safety and loss-of-control. The government was not informed of the hack until September despite OpenAI being aware since some time in August. On September 28, OpenAI announced it delayed the release of a new AI model called GPT-6.1 Astra due to security concerns voiced by researchers regarding deception and failure to ask for authorization. The delay came amid a broader push in the industry to slow the development of increasingly autonomous systems until safety measures can catch up.

Notes

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1379045865 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.