OpenAI Quietly Drops 'Safely' From Mission as Profits Take Priority

When OpenAI filed its 2024 tax forms with the IRS, few noticed a subtle but significant change buried in the paperwork. The company that created ChatGPT had quietly erased one word from its mission statement: "safely."

Until 2022, OpenAI pledged to build artificial intelligence that "safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." By 2024, that mission had become simply ensuring "that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Gone was any explicit commitment to safety—and to being unconstrained by profit motives.

This wasn't just corporate wordsmithing. It signals a fundamental shift in priorities for a company now facing multiple lawsuits alleging psychological manipulation, wrongful death, and negligence related to its AI products.

From Nonprofit Lab to Profit Machine

OpenAI began life in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory, committed to making its findings public and royalty-free. But developing cutting-edge AI requires enormous capital, so the company created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 to attract investment.

Microsoft initially put in $1 billion, eventually reaching $13 billion by 2024. A late-2024 funding round raised another $6.6 billion, but with strings attached: the money would become debt unless OpenAI converted to a traditional for-profit structure where investors could own uncapped shares.

In October 2025, OpenAI reached that conversion agreement with California and Delaware attorneys general. The restructured company split into two entities: a nonprofit foundation holding just 26% of the stock, and a for-profit public benefit corporation. Microsoft now owns 27%, making it the largest single shareholder.

The company's valuation has soared to over $500 billion, up from $300 billion in March 2025. SoftBank recently finalized a $41 billion investment, with talks underway for another $30 billion.

Safety Takes a Back Seat

The timing of these changes is telling. As OpenAI pursued ever-larger funding rounds, safety commitments became inconvenient obstacles to investor confidence. The company has also reportedly disbanded its "mission alignment" team, according to tech outlet Platformer.

Alnoor Ebrahim, a scholar of nonprofit governance at Harvard, sees the mission statement change as "explicitly signaling that OpenAI is making its profits a higher priority than the safety of its products."

To be fair, OpenAI still mentions safety on its website, stating that its mission "requires simultaneously advancing AI's capability, safety, and positive impact." But actions speak louder than website copy, and the formal mission statement—the one filed with tax authorities and used in legal documents—now omits safety entirely.

Alternative Models Existed

Other organizations have managed similar transitions while preserving their core missions. When California's Health Net converted from nonprofit to for-profit in 1992, regulators required 80% of its equity to transfer to another nonprofit foundation, ensuring mission alignment remained paramount.

The Philadelphia Inquirer offers another model. The newspaper became a for-profit public benefit corporation in 2016 but remains owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute. This structure allows investment while preserving journalism's public service mission—a template other local news organizations have adopted.

A coalition of California nonprofits has argued that OpenAI should have transferred all its assets to an independent nonprofit rather than retaining control through a minority stake.

Regulatory Oversight Falls Short

The restructuring agreement does include some safety provisions: a safety committee with authority to halt product releases, and requirements that the for-profit board consider mission over financial interests on safety matters. But without "safety" explicitly in either entity's mission, accountability becomes nearly impossible.

Moreover, nearly all board members serve on both the nonprofit and for-profit boards, raising questions about meaningful oversight. California Attorney General Rob Bonta claimed the deal ensures "safety will be prioritized," but it's unclear whether he was aware of the mission statement changes.

The Broader Stakes

This isn't just about one company's corporate governance. OpenAI's transformation represents a test case for how society oversees organizations with the potential for both enormous benefits and catastrophic harm. As AI capabilities advance rapidly, the question of who controls these systems—and what motivates them—becomes existential.

The restructuring has already succeeded in attracting massive investment, with potential deals worth up to $60 billion from Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft. An eventual IPO would further increase pressure to prioritize shareholder returns over safety considerations.