OpenAI’s nonprofit mission fades further into the rearview

The AI lab founded to serve humanity is restructuring to let investors and employees profit without limits—deepening fears that safety may take a back seat to growth.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to build safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. For a while, that structure made sense. But in 2019, the company made a discovery that changed everything: Scaling up AI models—with more data, compute, and parameters—led to predictably stronger results.