Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever found OpenAI as nonprofit pledging $1 billion to develop AI for humanity's benefit

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and seven other researchers announced OpenAI, Inc. on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit research lab explicitly not controlled by any single company, government, or individual. Founding donors—including Musk, Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Amazon Web Services—pledged $1 billion, with the stated mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity rather than a small group of corporations. The nonprofit structure was designed to prevent profit motives from overriding safety research.