OpenAI launched as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015, backed by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others with the stated goal of ensuring AI benefited humanity. By 2019, the structure shifted to a "capped-profit" model to attract venture capital. The GPT series, DALL-E, Codex, and ChatGPT followed in succession. Microsoft committed $13 billion across multiple rounds and embedded OpenAI models into Azure, Bing, and Office. The November 2023 governance crisis — Altman's removal and reinstatement within five days — revealed how deeply market confidence had become concentrated around a single organization's leadership. OpenAI's ongoing shift toward for-profit conversion and its Pentagon contracting activity are the defining structural questions heading into 2026.