As OpenAI celebrates its tenth birthday in December 2025, the corporate can have a good time its rise to one among the world's leading corporations perhaps as much as $1 trillion (750 billion kilos). But it began as a nonprofit with a serious moral mission — and its history shows how difficult it’s to mix morality and capitalism.
The company recently became one “non-profit corporation”which suggests that, along with providing some kind of public good, it now also has an obligation to generate profits for its shareholders, reminiscent of Microsoft.
This is kind of a change from the unique setup.
Influenced by a movement called “effective altruism”a project that tries to seek out essentially the most effective ways to assist others, OpenAIs first mission was to “be certain that artificial general intelligence (…) advantages all of humanity” – including stopping the enslavement of fraudulent AI systems or Extinction of humanity.
Being a nonprofit organization was central to this mission. If the most effective method to generate profits was to push AI in dangerous directions, a for-profit company would do it, but a nonprofit wouldn't. As CEO Sam Altman said in 2017: “We never intend to make decisions that profit shareholders. The only people we wish to be accountable to is humanity as a complete.”
So what has modified?
Some argue that the corporate is easy Sold out – that Altman and his colleagues were faced with the alternative of constructing a fortune or sticking to their principles and took the cash. (Many of OpenAI's founders and early employees selected this leave the corporate as a substitute.)
But there’s one other explanation. Perhaps OpenAI has realized that it must generate profits to meet its moral mission. It is AI in any case a really expensive businessand OpenAI’s competitors – reminiscent of Google, Amazon and Meta – are huge corporations with large financial resources.
To have a probability of influencing AI development in a positive direction, OpenAI needed to compete with them. Investment was required to be competitive. And it’s difficult to draw investment with none prospect of profit.
As Altman said about an earlier shift to for-profit: “We had tried enough to boost the cash as a nonprofit and failed. We didn't see a path forward there. So we wanted among the advantages of capitalism.”
Capitalist competition
But with the advantages of capitalism come constraints. What Karl Marx called The “constraints of competition” mean that in a competitive market, corporations have little alternative but to place profit first, no matter their moral principles.
If they select to not do something profitable for moral reasons, they know that they will probably be replaced by a less conscientious company that can accomplish that. This means not only that they’re failing as an organization, but in addition that they’re failing of their moral mission.
The Philosopher Iris Marion Youngillustrated this paradox using the instance of a sweatshop that claims that it would really like to treat its staff higher. But the associated fee of improved wages and dealing conditions would make them less competitive, meaning they lose out to competitors who treat their staff even worse. So be kinder to your staff wouldn't be of any use.
Similarly, OpenAI had held off releasing ChatGPT as a result of concerns Energy consumption or Self-harm or Misinformationit will probably have lost market share to a different company. This, in turn, would have made it harder to boost the essential investments to meet their mission of constructing AI development sustainable.
So, in effect, OpenAI was already behaving like a for-profit company even when its moral mission was supposedly paramount (before it became a nonprofit company). This was essential as a way to remain competitive.
The most up-to-date legislative transition now makes this official. The indisputable fact that a nonprofit board committed to the moral mission generally retains some control over the corporate is unlikely to stop the pursuit of profit in practice. Marx's compelling laws of competition drive morality out of the economy.
Marx and Milton
If Marx is capitalism's most famous critic, perhaps its most famous cheerleader was the economist Milton Friedman.
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But Friedman actually agreed with Marx that business and morality are difficult to combine. In 1971 he was wrote that managers have just one social responsibility: to generate profits for shareholders.
To pursue some other goal could be to spend other people's money on their very own private principles. And in a competitive market, Friedman argued, businesspeople will find that customers and investors can quickly move to other corporations “which are less conscientious about their social responsibilities.”
All of this means that we cannot expect corporations to do what OpenAI originally promised and put humanity over shareholder value. Even if it tries, the compelling laws of competition will force it to pursue profit.
Friedman and Marx would also agree that we want different kinds of institutions to care for humanity. Although Friedman was largely skeptical of presidency, the AI arms race is strictly the case even he recognized it required government regulation.
For Marx, the answer is more radical: replacing the coercive laws of competition with more cooperative financial system. And my very own research suggests that securing humanity's future may very well take loads Containment of capitalism to present engineers time to collaboratively develop protected and ethical technologies, free from market pressures.
