OpenAI

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Three years ago, few people outside of Silicon Valley were aware of OpenAI. Today, virtually every business leader is obsessing over how to use, adapt to, or compete with ChatGPT, the large language model OpenAI invented. The protean startup has become almost synonymous with generative AI, and its groundbreaking advancements have earned it unparalleled influence. After an October funding round, the company is valued at a dizzying $157&nbsp;billion.OpenAI and cofounder and CEO Sam Altman have raced to solidify this first-mover advantage: In late October, OpenAI introduced its first AI-powered search engine, and the company is tackling its ever-growing processing needs by developing its own chips in-house. The New York Times has reported that the startup anticipates $3.7&nbsp;billion in revenue in 2024—and more than three times that much in 2025. The trillion-dollar question: How long can OpenAI sustain its leading position, as deep-pocketed competitors like Google, Amazon Web Services, and major OpenAI investor Microsoft strengthen their own AI products?

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OpenAI rocked the world with the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022—and then again in mid-November when the abrupt ouster of cofounder Sam Altman captivated the business and tech worlds over an insane weekend of boardroom drama. It’s not remotely clear what the fallout from the OpenAI combustion may eventually be. And, as Fortune has reported, it was the unusual corporate structure that OpenAI was built upon that enabled the power struggle <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/11/20/openai-unusual-governance-structure-sam-altman-ousted/">to play out in the first place</a>. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit (the company has since added a capped-profit arm) by a group of tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk (who has since broken with the company) and now ex-CEO Altman, OpenAI is among those in the AI space whose explicit goal is the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a single AI model that can perform any economically-valuable intellectual task humans can as well or better than we can. It took only two months for ChatGPT to reportedly garner 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever at the time. OpenAI’s latest version, GPT-4 Turbo, which users of OpenAI's paid ChatGPT Plus service and enterprise customers of its API have access to, is the most capable general-purpose large language foundation model yet released. It can do everything from write code to write plays, as well as create images, give you recipes based on a photo of what is in your fridge, and use an increasing number of internet-connected tools. A version of GPT-4 is also integrated with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Its massive ambitions have earned OpenAI equally massive funding—including $13 billion from Microsoft alone. But the company’s innovations have also put it under scrutiny, including from the government, over what its technologies could do and what regulations should govern—and control—it. The company is also facing numerous lawsuits for copyright infringement and data privacy leaks. Whatever ends up happening with Altman and the rest of the OpenAI team, you can bet on this, the world will be watching.

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OpenAI | Fortune

OpenAI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Jeremy Kahn

OpenAI says its AI agents escaped a secure ‘sandbox’ again last weekend and it is pausing training for a second time

/2026/09/26/openai-ai-agents-secure-sandbox-escape-training-pause-second-time-hugging-face-hack/

Alexei Oreskovic

OpenAI rogue agents leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users and reportedly created nearly 1 million links packing encoded bits of info

/2026/09/25/openai-rogue-agents-images-sam-altman-chatgpt-users-links-encoded-info-hugging-face-hack/

Sebastian Herrera

Microsoft unveils Copilot super app, targeting business users with AI agents

/2026/09/25/microsoft-unveils-copilot-super-app-targeting-business-users-with-ai-agents/

Tae E. Bolling

When the machine should stop and call a human

/2026/09/25/agentic-ai-human-judgment-governance/

Catherina Gioino

Washington still hasn’t passed an AI safety law. New York City, where AI giants are expanding fastest, is writing its own

/2026/09/25/new-york-city-council-speaker-ai-regulation-bills-openai-anthropic/

OpenAI says its AI agents escaped a secure 'sandbox' again last weekend and it is pausing training for a second time

https://fortune.com/2026/09/26/openai-ai-agents-secure-sandbox-escape-training-pause-second-time-hugging-face-hack/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2026/09/25/openai-rogue-agents-images-sam-altman-chatgpt-users-links-encoded-info-hugging-face-hack/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2026/09/25/microsoft-unveils-copilot-super-app-targeting-business-users-with-ai-agents/?itm_source=parsely-api

Emily Forlini

OpenAI to unveil GPT-6 Cyber model, plus a first-of-its-kind product to help deploy it

https://fortune.com/2026/09/24/openai-launching-gpt-6-cyber-model-and-security-product-devday/?itm_source=parsely-api

How Meta took the lead in the race for the post-smartphone world

https://fortune.com/2026/09/23/meta-ai-smart-glasses-privacy-wearables-hardware-race-openai-apple-snap/?itm_source=parsely-api

OpenAI says its AI models secretly broke out of a secure test environment and hacked into AI company Hugging Face in order to cheat on an evaluation

https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/openai-says-ai-models-escaped-control-hacked-hugging-face/?itm_source=parsely-api

Washington still hasn't passed an AI safety law. New York City, where AI giants are expanding fastest, is writing its own

https://fortune.com/2026/09/25/new-york-city-council-speaker-ai-regulation-bills-openai-anthropic/?itm_source=parsely-api

Beatrice Nolan

Report reveals yet more cases of OpenAI's 'rogue AI' agents hacking websites—and suggests they may still have been active in recent weeks

https://fortune.com/2026/09/24/openai-more-rogue-ai-agents-hacking-websites-cryptoexchange-in-september-research-report-transluce/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jake Angelo

Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days

https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/ai-model-simulation-claude-chatgpt-grok-gemini/?itm_source=parsely-api

Why has Effective Altruism, a philanthropic philosophy built on solving charity like a math problem, become the center of Washington's biggest battle over AI?
From major figures at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to sharp criticism from defense officials, the movement is facing unprecedented political scrutiny. Senior AI reporter Bea Nolan joins Fortune Daily to break down what Effective Altruists actually believe, why critics claim it threatens technological progress, and what the debate over AI "doomers" means for the future of the industry.
Also on today's episode: 
• Imperia Launch: First Lady Melania Trump rings the NYSE opening bell to debut Imperia, an invite-only network designed as a "Davos for women" connecting female CEOs with global capital and dealmakers. 
• Under the Radar: Business Editor Nick Lichtenberg explores how Gen Z is building wealth with help from parents—and the economic guilt driving families to step in.

Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 
Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 - Why Washington Is Targeting Effective Altruism 
01:48 - Inside the AI Doomer Debate with Bea Nolan 
11:25 - Melania Trump Launches "Imperia" at NYSE 
13:48 - How Gen Z Relies on the Bank of Mom and Dad


Effective Altruism Explained: Why the Pentagon Is Attacking AI 'Doomers' | Fortune Daily

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You know, he said the administration is trying to pin concerns about AI safety and a desire for regulation on this sort of shadowy group of people that yes, has some odd beliefs to distract from the fact that AI risk is actually becoming a really real and much broader public concern. Hello from New York. I'm Ellie Austin and this is Fortune Daily. Americanism not effective altruism. That's what the Department of War posted on X earlier this month. But what is effective altruism? It's a great question, and I have to say I didn't have a clue until a day or so ago. So it turns out it's a philanthropic philosophy pioneered over a decade ago by two Oxford academics, and it's about approaching charity like a math problem. And figuring out how to save the most lives per dollar. Advocates of EA as it is known for short, include senior figures at OpenAI, at Anthropic, and Google, DeepMind. Meanwhile, the administration believes that EA is what's standing between America and global AI domination. Uh, Pete Hegseth has been particularly vocal on this subject, calling EA sanctimonious. So Fortune. Senior AI reporters Emily Fellini and B Nolan have been reporting on how a fringe movement of mostly young, highly educated utilitarians became Washington's favorite AI villain, and B Nolan is about to join me to explain more. The, hello and thank you so much for joining us from London. So I briefly explained in the intro what effective altruism is, but I also explained that I had never heard of this term until two days ago. So I think you can probably be more eloquent. Give us a rundown of what this movement is. So at its simplest, effective altruism is a philosophical movement, and it's this idea that people should try and use like rational processes to try and do the most good for the most amount of people. Actually traces back to 2009 and these two Oxford philosophers, they founded this thing called Giving What You Can, and it was a pledge that you would donate like 10% of your charity, 10% of your income to charity. Um, the idea was to treat like charity and ethics as like a math problem and you would try and figure out what causes saved the most lives or did the most good per dollar spent. Unpack that for me. So instead of spending it on a charity in the US. You could send money abroad and perhaps that would save more lives or do more good. Another big part of this that links to that is this thing called earn to give. So the idea is that you can do more good by making more money, basically pursuing a high career and then giving that income to these really effective charities. In a way it's an argument for capitalism. Yes, it's very linked to the idea of capitalism. It's also very linked to these analytical math problems, right? Like most people don't treat ethics like maths in this way. I guess the issue is it can lead you to some perhaps immoral places. So if you're trying to do the most good. You could justify a lot of things to get to your outcome, so the ends justify the means in a lot of places. Give us an example of how it could, because to me on the surface this sounds this sounds like a good move for humankind. Um, tell us how it could be used immorally or leveraged immorally. I guess it's an older philosophical problem, right? If you could save 100 lives but you'd have to personally kill one person. Would you choose to do that? Technically, EA and utilitarianism, which is what this is based in, would say that the moral thing to do would be to kill that person. OK, now imagine if that person was your mother. Would you still kill that person to save 100 others? I mean, most people would say no, and it would be ethically immoral to do that, but EA technically have taken to his extremes, would say it was immoral not to do. So you mentioned that EA was born over a decade ago at this point. Why is it finding itself in the headlines now and why has it become so woven into the debate over AI and safety? Yes, it is a bit of a wormhole, but there is, they've always been concerned with AI, and part of this is because they're obsessed with this thing called long-termism, which means when you say they, you mean advocates of EA, yeah, people who subscribe to the philosophical movement. They have been really interested in this idea that you need to protect future generations from risk, so they care a lot about things like climate change and things like that. They also were very early adopters of this idea that we've been hearing about a lot that AI could potentially wipe out humanity. Like then stopping that becomes a moral directive, right? You need to make sure AI is safe and engage in safety research and try and steer AI to be moral in order to stop it, to try and stop it trying to murder all of us. And who is our typical effective altruist? Is there a demo that you can paint for us? I don't know. I think I wouldn't want to tarp everyone who believes in this with the same brush. There are lots of different strands of it. Like some people are genuinely just interested about how they can give to charity and perhaps how they can give to charity more effectively. It's really popular in Silicon Valley because it takes on ethics with this really analytical mindset. So like I said earlier, it's like reducing these ethical problems to maths, and a lot of people who work in Silicon Valley and work in computer science like. That is the way their brain works, so they lean more towards that. Yeah, it makes sense. I think I'm right in saying that one of the early advocates of Sam Bankman Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, he is in prison now for fraud. How much does his character, his trajectory loom over and define the movement at this point in 2026? Honestly, quite a lot. He was one of the earliest adopters. He was also one of the biggest bankrollers, so he was a really good example of this urn to give. So he was like, I'm going to go start this huge crypto exchange program. I'm going to make loads of money and then I'm going to contribute it all back to charity. But obviously, as we know now, in the course of doing that, he committed a lot of immoral acts to get to that end. And then people who criticize EA use that as a very good example of how the means do not always justify the ends. Your sources in the piece suggest that this heightened anxiety around EA that we're seeing coming out of the administration at the moment is really a proxy fight and that going over EA is actually a way to discredit AI anxiety. Yesterday at the UN, President Trump described sort of the doomsday AI argument as a hoax. Do you believe that's true? What did your reporting tell you about this theory? Yeah, I mean, I think one of my sources put it like this, which I thought was a really good way to describe it, you know, he said the administration is trying to pin concerns about AI safety and a desire for regulation on this sort of shadowy group of people that, yes, have some odd beliefs to distract from the fact that AI risk is actually becoming a really real and much broader public concern. So in terms of the administration they're very keen to keep regulation off the table. So if they can blame the push for regulation and the push for AI safety on a small group of people with Outside interests like that might make sense for them. I mean that isn't what we're seeing right now in the headlines. I mean just in the general news agenda, I think it's clear that, you know, Jensen Huang is talking about the need for regulation and so I wonder how much that argument is going to hold up in the coming weeks. Um, EA is a movement that some people right now are a bit reticent to be associated with for the exact reasons that you just described. How difficult was it to get people to talk to you for your piece? I mean, interestingly, not that hard. I had a lot of people who worked in AI safety and were researchers on that and had taken money from EA affiliated charities to work on their early research, and they really wanted to make this distinction that just being concerned with AI risk. mean that you're an effective altruist. Like there are lots of people who take this very seriously as an academic issue and sort of by virtue of EA being one of the only people funding research like this, they ended up being quite involved with it, but that doesn't mean that these two things should be lumped together. There's a bit of a tension as I understand it, because on the one hand everything we've been talking about over the past few weeks on this show and beyond is that these AI companies don't care about our future. They don't care about our safety. But now EA posits that actually there's people working at high levels of anthropic and open AI and DeepMind who do really care about the future of humanity. And that's why they've chosen to go into the AI business. I mean, it's interesting. I think one of the criticisms here that might make sense is that AI gets criticized a lot for focusing way too much on these long term risks that might never actually happen. So I think you've heard people say, you know, there's a 10% AI chance AI might wipe out humanity. OK, well there's Much higher percentage chance that it might be used to spread misinformation. It might be used for mass scale hacking, and by focusing on these longer, almost sci-fi risks, they get accused of overlooking these more immediate ones, which a lot of the people in the lab, in the labs, they're very concerned with existential risk. So what actually is the outlook on regulation right now? Has anything actually shifted since Jacob Coxon resigned from? A couple of weeks ago and published that very controversial essay post. I think the main thing is, as I'm sure you've seen, we've all seen is that the public concern about AI risk has really skyrocketed and people in Congress have been responding to that. There has been a push from both Republicans and Democrats to get some regulation on the table and control some of this stuff. It doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be this slowdown that people are asking for, but maybe there's a sort of Consensus forming that having some rules around this technology if it is so dangerous wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. You mentioned um effective altruism charities a moment or so ago. If people want to find out more about this, where should they look? What are some of those charities? One of the main ones is um open philanthropy, and that later became Coefficient Giving. Um, they were founded by one of them was founded by one of the co-founders of Facebook, interestingly, so they do have deep roots to Silicon Valley. Um, yeah, you could find you they disclose their funding and where it goes, so you could look into um their disclosures around that. Um, but generally they have steered a lot of their funding towards addressing these existential risks, so you'll find effective altruists and effective altruist money popping up in lots of places when it comes to AI safety and also AI pro AI regulation. Thank you so much for explaining this weird and wonderful world of AI effective altruism to us. Speak soon. Thanks, Ellie. So that's First Lady Melania Trump ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning, and the exchange is serving as the backdrop for her newly launched initiative, um, which was announced last night, and it's being framed as quote a Davos for women. So what is it? Well, it's called Imperia, and it is an invite only network for. Female CEOs and C-suite leaders with the goal of supposedly connecting the people who move capital, who make deals, and who shape policy. Here at Fortune, I lead our most powerful women summit, uh, which has been going on for almost 30 years now, bringing together women from the most powerful companies globally. And I'm often asked whether in 2026 we actually still need a business conference with only women in the room. My answer is women currently run around 15% of Fortune 500 companies, 15. Now, believe it or not, that is actually a record, but it is still a woefully low number. So yes, I believe that until leadership of the world's largest companies inches closer towards parity, we do indeed need to bring female CEOs and other senior leaders together to share insights and to Discuss the unique challenges that they still face en route to the corner office. With all of that in mind, I applaud the First Lady's intention, um, even if it is dissonant with her husband's pretty firm rollback of DEI policies across corporate America and also across the military and more. At this point, additional details on Imperia are thin, so watch this space, it will be interesting to see how it evolves, who gets involved, and whether it actually leads to concrete deal flow, to investment, and to real opportunity for a diverse lineup of female leaders. Contrary to popular opinion, Gen Z isn't giving up on building wealth. They're just leaning on mum and dad to do it, and parents are feeling guilty about the economy that they're handing over to their kids. Business editor Nick Lichtenberg has the story in Under the Radar. Nick, hello. So on Monday you went to the release of the US bank's, uh, newly released 2026 wealth report, and it's really fascinating what it showed us about, I think how Gen Z are thinking about wealth accumulation. There's this common thinking that actually Gen Z don't care about becoming rich. Um, they are out there enjoying real life experiences and big iced coffees, um, for $8 a pop. Is that true? Is that what this data shows us? No, so the, the, uh, executives at US Bank, similar to other sources I've talked to, are totally different organizations, they've said like Gen Z really is just not that different when you really look under the hood and you ask them what they want and what their aspirations are and what their strategies are. Like the economy is the thing that's different. Gen Z is, is no different from any other generation in terms of what they want. They want to build wealth and they want a good career and I had a separate report out from Boston Consulting Group saying if you look closely, Gen Z is actually doing better than previous generations did at the same age, but it just doesn't feel that way to almost anyone. By what metrics are they doing better? How do we explain that in terms of the wealth they've accumulated at a young age, but I think because We feel like iced coffee, for example, is so expensive. Like you could spend $8 on an iced coffee without realizing it. Just things feel so expensive and so the US bank executives said, I asked them actually is the bank of mom and dad still a thing? It's kind of a cliche that Gen Z, you know, they moved back in after college and they're still relying on the bank of mom and dad, and they said, yeah, that's a real thing, uh, that they track, um, and that it didn't come through. In quite these words, but one of the executives said that there's a guilt feeling that parents have about, you know, sorry we handed this economy that's so expensive over to you guys. And so how does that guilt manifest? What do they give to their children if they're able to? I think it's a lot of general spending money. Like people in their early twenties, they feel less stigma asking for this, and parents feel less stigma giving it to them. Um, that's interesting, um, and the bank of mum and dad is, is nothing new obviously. So did we millennials not depend on it? What does the data show? I mean, I feel like if you spoke to my parents, they would say it was also a thing when we were in our twenties. Yeah, I think there's, there's some of that and you know, millennials were known for burning ourselves out and for hustling too much and for being a little workaholic and Gen Z, we, we do have lots of different indicators showing that there's a different mentality around, uh, boundaries between work and life and. I would say millennials had an unhealthier sense of that. What shock does Gen Z have about home ownership, for instance? So that is the one area that everyone identified as a real problem. Like the average starter home cost is way over 350,000. I think it's close to 400,000 across the country, across the country, and That's the one area where the economy, like viscerally it feels so, so unaffordable. We have Gen Z watching. What are the main takeaways from the report and what should they be doing right now with the money they do have available to them to maybe target owning a home within the next decade? Yeah, I would say that, um, so some of the executives said Gen Z surprised them with how conservative they actually are. And I asked them if financial nihilism, which we hear about, is a real thing, financial nihilism is this phrase for Gen Z's love of cryptocurrencies and alternative investment prediction markets, meme stocks, um, even Pokemon cards, comic books, um. Really affluent Gen Zers buying dinosaur bones we hear about, uh, but I asked, is this really a thing, and the executives said, you know, at the fringes there's more interest, a little bit, but by and large, no, that is not a thing, and Gen Z wants the same thing that any generation wants and the housing market, you know, we're living longer lives. Invest wisely and conservatively and kind of pay your dues, and you will eventually get your chance to get into that. The housing market and all the other markets that adults belong to and maybe give up on the dinosaur bones. Yeah, maybe dinosaur bones maybe for a very niche niche group. Where do you buy a dinosaur bone? You know they have auctions at Sotheby's for dinosaur bones. Fascinating. Of course everyone wants the T. rex, but there's only a little bit of those. A segment for another day, Nick, thank you. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin, please remember to like, to subscribe and to let us know in the comments on our YouTube what you thought of today's topics. I'll see you tomorrow.

Should the tech industry drastically slow down AI development?
On today’s episode of Fortune Daily, we break down an intense weekend of debate surrounding long-term AI safety and frontier model development. Following Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay urging the industry to “pace the frontier,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell for an exclusive interview.
In a striking moment from one of the central figures accelerating the AI race, Altman agrees that development may need to be paced. We share exclusive clips from the interview and sit down with Fortune’s senior AI reporter Emily Forlini to break down what this means for the future of tech, safety regulations, and the global race for artificial intelligence.
In this episode: • Dario Amodei’s call to “pace the frontier” • Exclusive clips: Sam Altman sits down with Alyson Shontell • Analysis and context with Fortune Senior AI Reporter Emily Forlini
Watch Alyson Shontel’s full interview with Sam Altman on Titans and Distruptors: https://youtu.be/RSZSGa9if8k

Follow Emily Forlini on Instagram - @emily.forlini 

Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 

Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

Why ChatGPT’s Founder Wants to Pump the Brakes on AI | Fortune Daily

In this week’s episode, Substack CEO Chris Best joins the show to discuss the company’s new AI-detection feature. Plus, an ex-Anthropic researcher sparks a media frenzy with a warning that AI could become smart enough to “kill us all,” while OpenAI claims it cracked a $1 million math problem — sparking a backlash amongst mathematicians. Fortune AI Editor Jeremy Kahn and Senior AI Reporter Beatrice Nolan break down the biggest AI stories of the week.


Substack CEO: AI Prose is an “Acquired Distaste” | Fortune AI Weekly 

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits down with Fortune's Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to discuss the high-stakes balancing act of AI: pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery while confronting the existential risks of loss of control. 

In this episode, Altman addresses the reality of AI alignment, the Hugging Face incident, and OpenAI's commitment to halting training runs if safety thresholds aren't met. He also shares insights on global AI coordination between the U.S. and China, healthcare breakthroughs, and the company's timeline for an IPO.

Sam Altman: Safety Standards 'Not at a Place' to Push AI Capabilities Much Further

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