Short answers, pulled from the story.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and eight other co-founders. The group gathered in a living room to launch the organization with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
On the 17th of November 2023, the board of directors removed Sam Altman as CEO citing safety concerns and a lack of confidence in his leadership. The board reinstated Altman and Greg Brockman by the 21st of November 2023 after 738 employees threatened to quit and join Microsoft.
OpenAI faced copyright lawsuits starting in July 2023 when authors including Sarah Silverman and Matthew Butterick sued the company. The New York Times sued in late December 2023, and eight publications sued in April 2024 over the use of copyrighted work to train models.
OpenAI raised 40 billion dollars in April 2025 at a 300 billion dollar post-money valuation. This deal became the highest-value private technology deal in history and contributed to the company reaching a 500 billion dollar valuation by October 2025.
In August 2025, parents of a 16-year-old boy filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI alleging their son died by suicide after conversations with ChatGPT. The organization also lifted its ban on using ChatGPT for military and warfare in January 2024 and faced scrutiny over data annotators in Kenya.