OpenAI is mulling a corporate restructuring designed to help coordinate the artificial intelligence developer’s nonprofit and for-profit arms, OpenAI said.
The ChatGPT maker has faced fierce pushback, including lawsuits, for a 2019 decision to create a for-profit business unit to operate alongside its original nonprofit foundation.
OpenAI is considering converting its for-profit division into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a legal structure for private enterprises producing public goods, according to a Dec. 27 blog post.
“The PBC is a structure used by many others that requires the company to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest in its decisionmaking,” OpenAI said in the post, adding:
“It will enable us to raise the necessary capital with conventional terms like others in this space.”
The proposed restructuring would also enable the nonprofit to “hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as healthcare, education, and science,” the AI developer added.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman congratulates the new White House crypto and AI “czar” on X, while the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, responds with an emoji. Source: Sam Altman, Elon Musk
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For-profit controversy
In 2024, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, sued the AI developer’s leadership, including CEO Sam Altman, for allegedly “violating terms of Musk’s “foundational contributions to the charity,” according to a Nov. 30 court filing.
In the lawsuit, Musk alleges Altman “intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence” and “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious nonprofit venture, OpenAI, Inc.”
In a March blog post, OpenAI said creating the for-profit entity was “necessary” for raising capital to amass the “vast quantities of compute” needed to run AI models.
Musk has since launched xAI — the firm behind AI chatbot Grok — which he said is falling victim to OpenAI’s anti-competitive practices.
United States President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive “White House AI and Crypto Czar,” David Sacks, has close ties to Musk and is also a critic of OpenAI.
In October, Sacks said OpenAI has “gone from nonprofit philanthropy to piranha, for-profit company.”
AI agent revenue grew substantially in the latter half of November. Source: VanEck
In 2025, AI agents — including those built using ChatGPT models — “are expected to take on a more prominent role within decentralized communities,” J.D. Seraphine, CEO of Web3 AI developer Raiinmaker, told Cointelegraph in December.
Asset manager VanEck expects upward of 1 million AI agents to populate blockchain networks by the end of 2025.
Magazine: Crypto has 4 years to grow so big ‘no one can shut it down’ — Kain Warwick, Infinex
