By MATT O’BRIEN and THALIA BEATY

OpenAI said Tuesday it has reorganized its ownership structure and converted its business into a public benefit corporation after two crucial regulators, the Delaware and California attorneys general, said they would not oppose the plan.

Related Articles

Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia

Layoffs are piling up, raising worker anxiety. Here are some companies that have cut jobs recently

A $20,000 football suite with luxe food is latest money machine for colleges

Officials show little proof that new tech will help Medicaid enrollees meet work rules

Average price for a new car surpasses $50,000 for first time

The restructuring paves the way for the ChatGPT maker to more easily profit off its artificial intelligence technology even as it remains technically under the control of a nonprofit.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a call Tuesday that “the most likely path” for the newly formed business is that it becomes publicly traded on the stock market, “given the capital needs that we’ll have and sort of the size of the company,” though a Wall Street debut was not a part of the announcements detailed Tuesday.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings and California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in separate statements that they would not object to the restructuring, seemingly bringing to an end more than a year of negotiations and announcements about the future of OpenAI’s governance and the power that for-profit investors and its nonprofit board will have over the organization’s technology.

The company also said it has signed a new agreement with its longtime backer Microsoft that gives the software giant a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation but changes some of the details of their close partnership. Microsoft’s $135 billion stake will be just ahead of the OpenAI nonprofit’s $130 billion stake in the for-profit company.

The attorneys general of Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, and California, where it is headquartered, had both spent months investigating the proposed changes.

“We will be keeping a close eye on OpenAI to ensure ongoing adherence to its charitable mission and the protection of the safety of all Californians,” said Bonta.

OpenAI said it completed its restructuring “after nearly a year of engaging in constructive dialogue” with the offices in both states.

“OpenAI has completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure,” said a blog post Tuesday from Bret Taylor, the chair of OpenAI’s board of directors. “The nonprofit remains in control of the for-profit, and now has a direct path to major resources before AGI arrives.”

AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a mission to safely build AGI for humanity’s benefit. It later started a for-profit arm.

Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and the two companies formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build OpenAI’s costly technology. It was a lifeline for the startup research lab, which is now valued at $500 billion but continues to lose more money than it makes. In turn, Microsoft heavily used the technology behind ChatGPT to enhance its own AI products.

The two companies first revealed in January that they were altering that agreement, enabling San Francisco-based OpenAI to build its own computing capacity, “primarily for research and training of models.” That coincided with OpenAI’s announcements of a partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas.

It’s since announced what Altman described Tuesday as a “$1.4 trillion total financial obligation” over the next few years, which includes more data center projects planned in the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America, along with big deals with chipmakers like Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.

Those investments left Microsoft’s OpenAI arrangement up in the air as the two companies appeared to veer further apart before reaching a tentative new agreement in September.

OpenAI had previously said its own nonprofit board will decide when AGI is reached, effectively ending its Microsoft partnership. But it now says that “once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel,” and that Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods “will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.” Microsoft will also retain commercial rights to OpenAI products “post-AGI” and through 2032.

“Microsoft can now count on 7 years of runway,” said an investor note from JP Morgan analysts, interpreting the news as a positive development for the software giant.

FILE – The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Microsoft put out the same joint announcement about the revised partnership Tuesday but declined further comment. Its shares spiked more than 2% on Tuesday.

Going forward, the nonprofit will be called the OpenAI Foundation and Taylor said it would grant out $25 billion toward health and curing diseases and protecting against the cybersecurity risks of AI. He did not say over what time period those funds would be dispersed.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said this arrangement does not guarantee the nonprofit independence, likening it to a corporate foundation that will serve the interests of the for-profit.

Even as the nonprofit’s board may technically remain in control, Weissman said that control “is illusory because there is no evidence of the nonprofit ever imposing its values on the for-profit.”

The Delaware attorney general’s investigation focused on ensuring OpenAI put its commitment to safety first and before any financial interests. Jennings also said OpenAI promised to keep its nonprofit in control of the public benefit corporation, including the right to appoint and remove its board members.

The removal of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in Nov. 2023 by the nonprofit’s board at the time — and his subsequent reappointment — kicked off the company’s effort to restructure.

The nonprofit’s board will continue to include a Safety and Security Committee, which will have the power “to oversee and review” OpenAI’s technology development. It will even have the power to stop the release of a new product, according to the Delaware attorney general’s statement.

Additionally, within a year, the nonprofit’s board will include at least two members who do not also serve on the public benefit corporation’s board.

OpenAI still faces a legal challenge from billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early OpenAI investor who now runs his own AI firm, xAI, and has accused the startup he co-founded of betraying its original mission.

A federal judge in March denied Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims.

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.

Writing on social media, Musk said that Grokipedia.com is “now live” and its goal is the “truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Musk has previously criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and called for people to stop donating to the site, which is run by a nonprofit. In September he announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI was working on Grokipedia.

The Grokipedia site has a minimalist appearance with little beyond a search bar where users can type in queries. It states that it has 885,279 articles. Wikipedia, meanwhile, says it has more than 7 million articles in English.

Like Wikipedia, users can search for articles on various topics such as Taylor Swift, the baseball World Series, or Buckingham Palace.

While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, it’s unclear how exactly Grokipedia articles are put together. Reports suggest the site is powered by the same xAI model that underpins Musk’s Grok chatbot, but some articles are seemingly adapted from Wikipedia.

As a huge trove of well-constructed sentences with little restriction on how it’s used, Wikipedia has been a key source used to train AI chatbots, including Grok’s rivals ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. That’s one reason Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress said they launched an investigation in August of alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

Wikipedia encourages its volunteer editors to cite nearly every sentence or paragraph with a primary source, and sentences not verified can be challenged and removed. Some of Grokipedia’s entries are thinly sourced, such as an entry on the Chola Dynasty of southern India that has three linked sources, compared to Wikipedia’s that has 113 linked sources plus dozens of referenced books.

Grokipedia’s entry on Wikipedia accuses the site of having “systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.”

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

By Noam N. Levey, KFF Health News

Mary Catherine Johnson is a retired small-business owner from outside Rochester, New York. She voted for Donald Trump three times.

Related Articles

Trump administration moves to overrule state laws protecting credit reports from medical debt

Trump administration shakes up ICE leadership across the country in major overhaul

Judge extends order barring the Trump administration from firing federal workers during the shutdown

Officials show little proof that new tech will help Medicaid enrollees meet work rules

Federal judge blocks the Trump administration from pulling funding for sex ed on gender diversity

Lexy Mealing, who used to work in a physician’s office, is from Long Island. She’s a Democrat.

But the women share a common bond. They both survived breast cancer.

And when the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network organized its annual citizen lobby day in Washington last month, Johnson and Mealing were among the more than 500 volunteers pushing Congress to keep cancer research and support for cancer patients at the top of the nation’s health care agenda.

The day is something of a ritual for groups like the cancer organization.

This year, it came as Democrats and Republicans in Washington slid toward a budget impasse that shut down the federal government. But these volunteers transcended their political differences and found common ground.

“Not one person here discussed if you’re a Democrat, if you’re a Republican,” said Mealing, one of 27 volunteers in the New York delegation. “Cancer doesn’t care.”

Every one of the volunteer lobbyists had been touched in some way by the deadly disease, which is expected to kill more than 600,000 people in the U.S. this year.

Johnson said each of her mother’s 10 siblings died from cancer, as did a lifelong friend who died at age 57, leaving behind his wife and two young daughters.

After visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill, hundreds of volunteers for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network gathered for a candlelight vigil at Constitution Gardens along the National Mall in Washington. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

Like many of the New York volunteers, Johnson also said she’s worried about the state of politics today.

“I think we’re probably the most divided that we’ve ever been,” she said. “That scares me. Scares me for my grandchildren.”

Katie Martin, a cancer volunteer from outside Buffalo, also worries. She and her daughter recently drove past political protesters screaming at one another on the street.

“My daughter is silent and then starts asking, ‘What is this?’ And I don’t know how to explain it, because it doesn’t even make sense to me,” she said. “It’s very heartbreaking.”

Mealing said she can barely watch the news these days. “A lot of Americans are very stressed out. There’s a lot of things going on.”

Despite a steady rain, volunteers from across the country and across the political spectrum converged on the National Mall in Washington recently to remember people who have died of cancer, part of an annual volunteer fly-in organized by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

Americans are indeed split over many issues — immigration, guns, President Trump. But helping people with cancer and other serious illnesses retains broad bipartisan support, polls show.

In one recent survey, 7 in 10 voters said it’s very important for the federal government to fund medical research. That included majorities of Democrats and Republicans.

“It’s rare in today’s environment to see numbers like that,” said Jarrett Lewis, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey for patient groups. “But almost everybody in this country knows somebody who’s had cancer.”

Similarly, a recent KFF poll found that three-quarters of U.S. adults, including most Republicans who align with the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, want Congress to extend subsidies that help Americans buy health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

These subsidies, which are critical to people with chronic illnesses such as cancer, are among the main sticking points in the current budget impasse in Congress.

As the cancer volunteers gathered in a conference hotel in Washington, they focused on their shared agenda: increasing funding for cancer research, retaining insurance subsidies, and expanding access to cancer screening.

“We may not see eye to eye politically. We might not even see eye to eye in social circumstances,” said Martin, the Buffalo-area volunteer. “But we can see beyond those differences because we’re here for one cause.”

The state delegations practiced the pitches they would make to their members of Congress. They ran through the personal stories they would share. And they swapped tips for how to deal with resistant staff and how to ask for a photo with a lawmaker.

After visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill, hundreds of volunteers for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network gathered for a candlelight vigil at Constitution Gardens along the National Mall in Washington. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

On the morning of their lobby day, they reconvened in a cavernous ballroom, decked out in matching blue polo shirts and armed with red information folders to leave at each office they would visit.

They got a pep talk from a pair of college basketball coaches. Then they headed across town to Capitol Hill.

The army of volunteers — from every state in the country — hit 484 of the 535 Senate and House offices.

Not every visit was an unqualified victory. Many Republican lawmakers object to extending the insurance subsidies, arguing they’re too costly.

But lawmakers from both parties have backed increased research funding and support for more cancer screening.

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteers from all 50 states decorated about 10,000 white paper bags with messages of hope and remembrance for people with cancer. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

And the New Yorkers felt good about the day. “It was amazing,” Mealing said as the day wrapped up. “You could just feel the sense of, ‘Everybody stronger together.’”

When evening came, the volunteers met on the National Mall for a candlelight vigil. It was raining. Bagpipes played.

Around a pond near the Lincoln Memorial, some 10,000 tea lights glimmered in little paper bags. Each luminary had a name on it — a life touched by cancer.

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteers from all 50 states decorated about 10,000 white paper bags with messages of hope and remembrance for people with cancer. (Charlotte Kesl/KFF Health News/TNS)

John Manna, another New Yorker, is a self-described Reagan Republican whose father died from lung cancer. He reflected on the lessons this day could offer a divided nation.

“Talk to people,” he said. “Get to know each other as people, and then you can understand somebody’s positions.  We have little disagreements, but, you know, we don’t attack each other. We talk and discuss it.”

Manna said he would be back next year.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“Unless we embrace the full potential of flexible, cost-effective collaborations between the city and civic-oriented non-profits, moments like the QueensWay setback will become the norm, not the exception.“

City officials announcing funding for the QueensWay proposal in 2022. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

Earlier this summer, New York City lost out on $112 million in federal funding for the QueensWay, a project championed by a community-driven partnership that is working to transform an abandoned rail corridor in Queens into a vibrant new greenway. It was a devastating setback for a project that promised health, mobility and environmental benefits in one of the city’s most park-starved boroughs.

But the damage goes beyond the project itself and extends to the urgency and need we face in fostering and funding more partnerships that bring together the city and community-based non-profits. No matter who wins this fall’s mayoral election, we must address a housing crisis, modernize failing infrastructure, expand our parkland and build a more resilient, equitable city. 

It’s a lot to get done, but unless we embrace the full potential of flexible, cost-effective collaborations between the city and civic-oriented non-profits, moments like the QueensWay setback will become the norm, not the exception.

The Central Park Conservancy was a pioneer in this space more than 40 years ago, when the organization was founded to address decades of public disinvestment in Central Park, one of the most treasured public spaces in the world. The Great Lawn had become a dustbowl, the Harlem Meer a trash-strewn mud puddle, while graffiti marred virtually every structure and rock outcropping.

Over the years, the Conservancy has slowly restored the Park to its current, glorious state, culminating with the opening last spring of the Davis Center—a new pool and rink in Harlem that the Conservancy managed and delivered on time and on budget, thanks to a $60 million investment by the city and $100 million in private funding. 

Others have followed a similar path over the decades—from the High Line to Moynihan Train Hall and the new LaGuardia Airport. These new icons of our cityscape show what’s possible when the public sector sets priorities and the private sector helps deliver them. We can transform long-stalled plans into lasting civic assets.

To be sure, partnerships must be structured with transparency and accountability, and never in a way that elevates private interests over the public good. This is not about “privatizing” the public resources; it’s about harnessing private resources to enhance the public realm.  

The private sector can bring creative solutions, technical expertise, flexibility and long-term commitment that are often difficult to marshal within traditional public systems. But it’s the partnership—the alignment of public mission and private ingenuity—that enables these projects to succeed at the scale New Yorkers need.

It’s an approach that can be just as effectively applied to some of the city’s most pressing challenges—from housing to transit to climate infrastructure. Investing in 500,000 new units of housing, realizing a modernized Penn Station, and preparing communities to withstand intensifying storms all require imaginative thinking and funding well beyond what the city alone can muster, especially at a time when federal funding for urban projects is becoming less reliable and more erratic.

We also must not lose sight of forward-looking opportunities, such as the Interborough Express (IBX)—a transformative project that would connect transit deserts across Brooklyn and Queens. RPA has championed this project for years because it would reduce commute times, expand job access, and better connect millions of New Yorkers. To bring it to life, we’ll need serious investment—and creative partnerships to match.

New York is not alone in developing this approach. Los Angeles has leveraged partnerships to expand its Metro system. Chicago rebuilt and activated its Riverwalk through blended financing. Cities from London to Sydney are building the future through collaborations that align public interest with private capacity.

This is one of the most critical inflection points in our city’s modern history.  The next mayor has a rare opportunity to turn bold plans into lasting progress. But that will only happen if we use every tool at our disposal and build a city that works for all. 

New York’s infrastructure is not just about roads, rails or parks. It’s about people, possibility and the kind of city we choose to be. If we want to leave future generations with a more livable, just and connected New York, we must be bold enough to build it together.

That means embracing new models, removing unnecessary barriers and seizing every opportunity to align civic vision with collective investment. Our greatest moments of transformation have always come from this kind of partnership. The next administration has the opportunity to lead in that tradition—and to leave a legacy worthy of this city’s promise.

Tom Wright is president and CEO of Regional Plan Association (RPA). Betsy Smith is the president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy.

The post Opinion: Funding Infrastructure That New Yorkers Deserve appeared first on City Limits.