For a couple of 12 months, Tyler Johnston has been gathering public details about the internal workings of OpenAI, and for the previous month, he’s been engaged on a report to assist the general public perceive and visualize it.
That report, dubbed The OpenAI Recordsdata, is out right this moment. It’s a collaboration between the Midas Venture and the Tech Oversight Venture, two nonprofit tech watchdog organizations, and it’s billed because the “most complete assortment thus far of documented considerations with governance practices, management integrity, and organizational tradition at OpenAI.”
The interactive website, which quantities to greater than 50 pages and over 10,000 phrases, chronicles OpenAI’s evolution from nonprofit analysis lab to moneymaking family identify, and the protection considerations and potential conflicts of curiosity it’s generated alongside the way in which. It makes use of sources like company disclosures, authorized complaints, open letters, media stories, and extra — issues that The Verge and different information retailers have steadily lined as particular person tales, however gathered in a single place right here. Charts and knowledge visualizations assist illustrate what we learn about OpenAI’s internal workings, together with the nonprofits’ greatest guess at OpenAI’s company construction, its authentic capped-profit construction, and the proposed plan for its restructuring.
One distinguished theme is how a lot OpenAI executives and board members stand to immediately or not directly acquire from the corporate’s successes. The nonprofits embody their greatest guess at CEO Sam Altman’s personal funding portfolio, which features a laundry listing of corporations — like Retro Biosciences, Helion Vitality, Reddit, Stripe, Rewind AI, and Rain AI — that at present have overlapping enterprise with OpenAI, comparable to partnerships, vendor relationships, or potential acquisition talks.
Johnston, who’s government director of The Midas Venture, informed The Verge that the challenge is partly about stating “the methods through which the imaginative and prescient that they’d within the late 2010s departed from the way in which that they’re behaving right this moment in 2025.”
The nonprofits behind the report stated they acquired no funding, help, editorial course, or “assist of any type” from Elon Musk, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft “or some other OpenAI competitor” and that the report has “full editorial independence.” OpenAI declined to remark.
“We’re in an archival challenge right here, the place we’re exhibiting what OpenAI was like then, what they’re like now… We’re simply placing that info in entrance of the reader and asking the reader to attract their very own conclusions about what to make of it,” Johnston informed The Verge.