As OpenAI marks its tenth birthday in December 2025, it can celebrate becoming one of the world’s leading companies, worth perhaps as much as US$1 trillion (£750 billion). But it started as a non-profit with a serious moral mission – and its story demonstrates the difficulty of combining morality with capitalism.
The firm recently became a “public benefit corporation”, meaning that – in addition to performing some sort of pubic good – it now has a duty to make money for its shareholders, such as Microsoft.
