The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement
13 February 2026
As a USA 501(c)(3) OpenAI nonprofit is required to file tax returns with the IRS every year. One of the required fields on that tax return is “Briefly describe the mission or most important activities of the organization” – this has real legal significance because the IRS can use it to evaluate whether the organization is sticking to its mission and is entitled to maintain its nonprofit tax-exempt status.
You can browse OpenAI’s tax filings by year on ProPublica’s excellent Nonprofit Explorer.
I looked at and extracted that mission statement for 2016 to 2024, then Claude Code helped me turn it into a git repository and fake the commit dates to share it as a gist – meaning the gist’s revisions page shows every edit they’ve made since they started filing their taxes!
It’s really interesting to see how they’ve changed over time.
The original 2016 mission is as follows (and yes, the apostrophe in “OpenAIs” is missing in the original):
OpenAI aims to advance digital intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit all of humanity without the need to generate financial returns. We believe that artificial intelligence technologies will help shape the 21st century, and we want to help the world build safer AI technologies and ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed as widely and equitably as possible. We’re trying to build AI as part of a larger community, and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way.
In 2018 they left out the part about “trying to build AI as part of a larger community”, and we want to share our plans and capabilities openly.
In 2020 he removed the words “benefits humanity as a whole” from the words “benefits humanity as a whole”. However, they are still “unconstrained by the need to generate financial returns”.
Some interesting changes in 2021. They are still unrestricted by the need to generate financial returns, but here we have the first reference to “general purpose artificial intelligence” (replacing “digital intelligence”). They are also more confident: it is not “most likely to benefit humanity”, it just “benefits humanity”.
They previously wanted to “help the world create safer AI technology”, but now they are going to do it themselves: “The company’s goal is to develop and responsibly deploy safer AI technology”.
2022 changed only one important word: they added “safely” to “creating…(AI) that safely benefits humanity.” They are still unrestricted by those financial returns!
No changes in 2023… but then in 2024 they removed almost the entire thing, reducing it to just this:
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
They have expanded “humanity” to “all of humanity” but now there is no mention of safety and I think they can finally start focusing on the need to generate financial returns!
update: I found nearly equivalent but much less interesting documentation from Anthropic.
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