OpenAI Foundation Pledges $1 Billion in Grants for Life Science and Health Research
OpenAI Foundation has pledged $1 billion in grants over the next year to support life science and health research while addressing AI's impacts on jobs and mental health. The nonprofit will recruit a new executive director to oversee grantmaking as part of its revitalized philanthropic mission.
The OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, has pledged to grant out $1 billion in the next year to support life science and health research and mitigate AI's impacts on jobs, the economy, and mental health. The commitment represents a major development in OpenAI's philanthropic activities and follows a previous commitment to spend $25 billion to support similar causes made in October, though without providing a time frame.
The nonprofit said it aims to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity's hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people's lives. OpenAI Foundation will also recruit a new executive director to oversee its grantmaking.
The new funding will seek to mitigate some of the impacts of AI technologies on jobs, the economy and mental health, especially of children. The nonprofit announced $40.5 million in grants to community-based nonprofits in December to support AI literacy, strengthen civic life and foster economic opportunity.
OpenAI started as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 but has sought to escape that structure over the past several years as it built out its commercial technologies like ChatGPT and its for-profit subsidiary, which is now one of the most highly valued startups in the world. In October, OpenAI finalized an agreement with regulators that left the nonprofit's board in charge of its for-profit business but eased the way for investors and the company to profit from its technologies. The deal also clarified the nonprofit's ownership stake in the company, which OpenAI said at the time was valued at $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced nonprofits in the country.
Since the incorporation of its for-profit business in 2019, OpenAI's nonprofit significantly scaled back its activities, going from listing $51 million in expenses in 2018 to $3.3 million the following year, according to its public tax filings. In 2024, the most recent year that the nonprofit reported its activities to the Internal Revenue Service, OpenAI's nonprofit received $4,433 in contributions and granted out $7.6 million.
In 2025, OpenAI made an effort to revitalize the nonprofit. It convened a temporary nonprofit advisory board to offer it nonbinding guidance about how to structure its philanthropic activities while it continued to negotiate with regulators and its investors about the extent to which the nonprofit board would remain in charge of its business. The advisory board eventually recommended that OpenAI significantly increase the resources it provided to its nonprofit and to consult extensively with communities about how AI is impacting them as it shapes its grant making.