Sam Altman

Leads ChatGPT, still the market-share leader

A billion people now open Google's Gemini assistant each month. Google said Tuesday the app passed that mark, its 14th product to reach a billion users and, by its own count, the fastest to get there.

Updated Yesterday

Diversifying OpenAI's chip supply away from Nvidia alone

Chip stocks lost more than $1 trillion in market value on July 28, 2026. Memory maker SK Hynix fell about 14% and Samsung dropped over 10%, pulling South Korea's Kospi down roughly 9%. Nvidia slid more than 5% and briefly handed the title of world's most valuable company back to Apple.

Updated Jul 28

Leading OpenAI's push into physical products

OpenAI has never sold a physical product. On July 15, it started, with a $230 desk gadget for programmers.

Updated Jul 15

Competing directly as Google pushes Gemini into Search and developer defaults.

When Google launched Gemini 3 Flash in December 2025, it bet that a fast, cheap model could become the default brain of Search, the Gemini app, and developer tooling. That bet compounded. Google shipped Gemini 3.1 Pro in February 2026 and Gemini 3.5 Flash in May; the latter reached general availability on July 14 and is now the default across every major Google surface.

Updated Jul 15

Company cooperated with government's request to stage GPT-5.6 launch but said customer-by-customer government approval should not become the long-term default

Trump signed a voluntary framework on June 2 asking frontier labs to share their newest models with federal agencies for up to 30 days before release. Within ten days, the government had gone further. A June 12 export control directive forced Anthropic to kill worldwide access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two newest models, after the government said it had found a jailbreak in the more capable one.

Updated Jun 26

OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 on June 8; Altman targeting a September–November 2026 IPO with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley

SoftBank's talks to borrow $6 billion against its OpenAI shares stalled on June 10 after banks balked at pricing private-company collateral. SoftBank had gathered roughly $5 billion in soft commitments before the pause.

Updated Jun 11

Pushing OpenAI's agent products into broader consumer and enterprise use

OpenAI's Codex can now see and click inside Windows applications, a capability Anthropic's Claude has offered since October 2024. Microsoft joined them at Build 2026 in early June, launching its own Windows Agent Framework as open-source software and introducing Scout, an always-on background agent for Microsoft 365.

Updated Jun 8

Leading OpenAI's push to turn ChatGPT into a persistent assistant

For most of ChatGPT's life, you had to tell it to remember things, one fact at a time. On June 5, 2026, OpenAI changed that. Its new 'Dreaming V3' system reads across years of your past chats and writes its own running profile of you, no prompting required.

Updated Jun 5

Leading OpenAI's accelerated model-iteration strategy

ChatGPT receives roughly a billion visits a month, and on May 5 those visitors began talking to a different model by default. OpenAI replaced GPT-5.3 Instant—the everyday workhorse it shipped earlier this year—with GPT-5.5 Instant, a faster system the company says produces 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims on medical, legal, and financial questions. The new model can also pull context from a user's past chats, uploaded files, and Gmail to personalize answers, and it appears in OpenAI's developer interface as 'chat-latest.'

Updated May 31

Leading the enterprise pivot ahead of a planned public listing

OpenAI previewed Sora as a glimpse of cinema's AI future in February 2024. Twenty-six months later, on April 26, 2026, the company switched off the Sora consumer app for good.

Updated May 31

Preparing OpenAI for its own IPO, targeted for late 2026

Anthropic offered employees up to $6 billion in liquidity through a tender offer at a $350 billion valuation — the same price as its February fundraising round. Employees mostly said no. The sale completed in early April well below its target because staff chose to hold their shares, betting that the company's planned initial public offering (IPO) later in 2026 will deliver a higher price.

Updated May 31

Named personally in multiple wrongful death lawsuits

Florida's attorney general announced a formal investigation into OpenAI on April 9, 2026, alleging ChatGPT played a role in the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University that killed two and injured five. Court records show the shooter entered more than 270 prompts asking how the country would react to a campus shooting, when the student union is busiest, and how to operate his firearms.

Updated May 31

Leading IPO preparations while managing infrastructure pivot

Four months ago, Sam Altman told the world OpenAI had $1.4 trillion in data center commitments. Now the company is telling investors the real number is $600 billion — and that it would rather rent computing power than build its own facilities. The retreat, disclosed to investors in February 2026 and detailed publicly on March 22, marks the sharpest pivot in the short history of the artificial intelligence spending boom.

Updated May 30

Leading OpenAI's expansion into security and enterprise markets

For decades, finding security flaws in software has required expensive human experts or pattern-matching tools that miss complex bugs. In five months, all three frontier artificial intelligence labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) released autonomous agents that read code like a human researcher, discover vulnerabilities traditional scanners miss, and generate patches. On March 6, 2026, OpenAI launched Codex Security in research preview, an agent that scanned 1.2 million code commits in its first month of beta testing and discovered 14 previously unknown vulnerabilities serious enough to receive formal identifiers in OpenSSH, Chromium, and PHP.

Updated May 30

Managing fallout from Pentagon deal backlash

For decades, the United States military chose its weapons contractors and they complied, but artificial intelligence changed that. On March 3, OpenAI and the Pentagon amended a freshly signed AI contract to ban domestic surveillance of Americans—a concession the Pentagon had refused Anthropic, triggering the company's blacklist from all federal agencies.

Updated May 30

Pushing for Q4 2026 IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation; testified in Musk trial May 12; under congressional scrutiny over personal investment conflicts

After the $122 billion round closed in April, OpenAI ended its Azure cloud exclusivity and capped Microsoft's revenue share at $38 billion through 2030. On May 18, a jury dismissed Elon Musk's suit seeking $134 billion and the reversal of OpenAI's for-profit structure.

Updated May 29

Leading OpenAI through confidential IPO process; S-1 filed May 22, targeting Q4 2026 listing at up to $1 trillion

On May 28, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, passing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable private AI company. The round disclosed annualized revenue at $47 billion, up from $44 billion three weeks earlier. Anthropic is targeting an IPO this autumn.

Updated May 29

Released GPT-5.5 (April 23) while managing CFO revenue concerns; OpenAI annualized run rate ~$24-25B as rival Anthropic reportedly surpassed $30B ARR; $250B Azure contract disclosed by Microsoft deepens cloud dependency

The four largest cloud providers—Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon—are tracking toward over $720 billion in combined AI infrastructure spending for 2026, up sharply from $410 billion in 2025. All four reported first-quarter results on April 29, 2026. Microsoft delivered the clearest signal: $77.7 billion in revenue (up 18% year-over-year), Azure cloud growth of 40% (above its 37% guidance), and earnings per share of $4.13 versus analyst estimates of $3.67.

Updated May 26

Leading the company into its public-market debut

OpenAI filed a confidential draft registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday, May 22, 2026. The filing is the first formal step toward a public listing that could value the ChatGPT maker above $1 trillion.

Updated May 22

Publicly endorsing ads after years of resisting them

OpenAI ran ChatGPT as a paid and API-only product for three years. On May 21, the company opened a self-serve ad platform that lets any business buy placements inside the chatbot, with no minimum spend.

Updated May 21

Leading Stargate infrastructure buildout

The White House mobilized America's 17 national laboratories and major tech companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA. The Genesis Mission aims to double US research productivity in a decade by connecting supercomputers, quantum systems, and AI into one discovery platform. Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced 24 corporate partners at a January 11 summit.

Updated May 20

Leading OpenAI through intense competition and infrastructure challenges

OpenAI's GPT-5 dropped August 7, 2025, completing AI's shift from chatbots that string words together to systems that think through problems step-by-step. Google DeepMind's models won the International Math Olympiad by solving problems only five humans cracked, as Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and every major AI lab raced to build reasoning models.

Updated May 19

Running OpenAI, which fell to 32.3 percent enterprise share in April 2026 — the second consecutive monthly decline — as Anthropic extended its lead

Ramp's May 2026 AI Index shows 50.6 percent of US businesses now pay for AI tools, up from 50.4 percent in March. Anthropic holds 34.4 percent of those paying customers against OpenAI's 32.3 percent — the second consecutive month Anthropic has led.

Updated May 15

Driving OpenAI to lock in premium IP and consumer use cases as Sora scales.

Mickey Mouse just shook hands with the algorithm Hollywood spent two years trying to tame. Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI, letting Sora and ChatGPT Images legally generate short videos and images of more than 200 Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters — not the actors who play them.

Updated May 11