OpenAI

OpenAI was founded on 8 December 2015 by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and others, and builds general-purpose artificial intelligence systems that it ships as consumer products, developer APIs and enterprise software. Its work reached the mainstream with ChatGPT in November 2022, and the portfolio has since widened to the ChatGPT Atlas browser and the Codex coding agent. Its current frontier model, GPT-6 Astra, was released on 3 September 2026 with a "computer use" capability that navigates software the way a person would.

The company earns money four ways: consumer subscriptions, enterprise contracts, the developer API and, more recently, advertising. ChatGPT had more than 50 million paying subscribers as of July 2026, while enterprise sales — sold through products such as OpenAI Frontier, an agent-building platform launched on 5 February 2026 with HP, Oracle, State Farm and Uber among its first customers — accounted for more than 40% of revenue as of June 2026. Revenue was $13.1 billion for the whole of 2025; by August 2026 the annualized run rate had passed $40 billion, roughly double the end-2025 figure.

OpenAI's position rests on distribution at a scale few software companies have reached: ChatGPT crossed 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026, the fastest application in history to that mark, and was approaching 1 billion weekly active users by late July 2026. Its corporate form was settled on 28 October 2025, when the company recapitalized into OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Microsoft holds roughly 27% of the for-profit entity, an investment valued at about $135 billion, and OpenAI committed to purchase $250 billion of Azure cloud services; the two remain intertwined through at least 2032.

The trajectory is defined by compute. OpenAI is the operating partner in Stargate, the infrastructure programme announced with SoftBank and Oracle on 21 January 2025 with $100 billion committed up front and up to $500 billion planned over four years, and it lifted its own projected compute spending to $750 billion through 2030. Amazon has committed $50 billion to the company and 2 gigawatts of its Trainium silicon, with AWS becoming the exclusive cloud distributor for Frontier. Funding has kept pace — $122 billion raised at an $852 billion post-money valuation as of March 2026 — and on 8 June 2026 OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC for an initial public offering, without committing to a date.