OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, said it will grant out $1 billion over the next year to support life sciences and health research and to address some of the broader impacts of artificial intelligence. In a statement Tuesday, OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said the foundation aims to enable the use of AI to find solutions to “humanity’s hardest problems,” transform what people are capable of, and deliver benefits in people’s lives.
Taylor said the foundation intends to work with partners as it prepares for “new challenges” and to help make society more resilient as AI advances. OpenAI Foundation said the new funding also will seek to mitigate impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, with a focus on children.
The pledge represents what OpenAI Foundation described as a major step in its philanthropic activities. The foundation said the initiative follows its earlier commitment to spend $25 billion on similar causes, an earlier pledge it made in October without providing a time frame.
OpenAI Foundation said it will recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking. It also said Wojciech Zaremba, one of a handful of OpenAI co-founders still working for the company, will become the foundation’s head of AI resilience, a role focused on the “new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI.”
The foundation’s latest plan arrives amid questions about how OpenAI’s nonprofit mission is being carried out as the company has built out commercial technologies. OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but over time it sought to escape that structure as it developed its for-profit technologies, including ChatGPT, along with a for-profit subsidiary.
Regulators and governance arrangements have shaped the foundation’s role. In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that kept the nonprofit’s board in charge of the for-profit business while easing the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies, and it clarified the nonprofit’s ownership stake in OpenAI, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion.
A separate issue is what critics and outside observers say the nonprofit’s financial disclosures do—and do not—show. The company reported that its nonprofit activities scaled back after the for-profit business was incorporated in 2019, with expenses dropping from $51 million in 2018 to $3.3 million the next year, according to public tax filings. For 2024, the most recent year it reported to the Internal Revenue Service, the nonprofit said it received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.
Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting and public affairs at The Ohio State University who specializes in nonprofits, cautioned that tax forms were not well suited to capture the scale of OpenAI’s activities and how they align with its charitable mission. In an email, Mittendorf said people tend to focus on “the financial part of that,” but that an equally important issue is whether the product the company is developing is serving humanity as envisioned.
The nonprofit’s attempt to revive and reshape its role has been under way for some time. In 2025, OpenAI convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer nonbinding guidance on structuring its philanthropic activities while it continued negotiations with regulators and investors about how much control the nonprofit board would retain. The board, which included labor leader Dolores Huerta, recommended that OpenAI significantly increase resources provided to its nonprofit and consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it makes grantmaking decisions.
OpenAI Foundation said it announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity. The foundation’s revised vision is unfolding as communities in the U.S. raise concerns about data centers increasing electricity costs, and as lawsuits and other criticism target AI chatbot impacts on mental health. Some advocates and companies also question whether emerging AI technologies are fit to be used in war.
In addition to hiring a new director, OpenAI Foundation said it brought on Jacob Trefethen to lead its life sciences and health grantmaking. The foundation said Trefethen previously led a similar portfolio at the philanthropic organization Coefficient Giving, which is described as a major funder of the effective altruism community that has sometimes clashed with OpenAI’s vision for artificial intelligence.