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OpenAI, the maker of the most popular AI chatbot, used to say it aimed to build artificial intelligence that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return, mission statement. But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same emphasis on doing so safely. While reviewing its latest IRS disclosure form, which was released in November 2025 and covers 2024, I noticed OpenAI had removed safely from its mission statement, among other changes. That change in wording coincided with its transformation from a nonprofit organization into a business increasingly focused on profits. OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits related to its products safety, making this change newsworthy. Many of the plaintiffs suing the AI company allege psychological manipulation, wrongful death, and assisted suicide, while others have filed negligence claims. As a scholar of nonprofit accountability and the governance of social enterprises, I see the deletion of the word safely from its mission statement as a significant shift that has largely gone unreported outside highly specialized outlets. And I believe OpenAIs makeover is a test case for how we, as a society, oversee the work of organizations that have the potential to both provide enormous benefits and do catastrophic harm. Tracing OpenAIs origins OpenAI, which also makes the Sora video artificial intelligence app, was founded as a nonprofit scientific research lab in 2015. Its original purpose was to benefit society by making its findings public and royalty-free rather than to make money. To raise the money that developing its AI models would require, OpenAI, under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. Microsoft initially invested US$1 billion in this venture; by 2024 that sum had topped $13 billion. In exchange, Microsoft was promised a portion of future profits, capped at 100 times its initial investment. But the software giant didnt get a seat on OpenAIs nonprofit board meaning it lacked the power to help steer the AI venture it was funding. A subsequent round of funding in late 2024, which raised $6.6 billion from multiple investors, came with a catch: that the funding would become debt unless OpenAI converted to a more traditional for-profit business in which investors could own shares, without any caps on profits, and possibly occupy board seats. Establishing a new structure In October 2025, OpenAI reached an agreement with the attorneys general of California and Delaware to become a more traditional for-profit company. Under the new arrangement, OpenAI was split into two entities: a nonprofit foundation and a for-profit business. The restructured nonprofit, the OpenAI Foundation, owns about one-fourth of the stock in a new for-profit public benefit corporation, the OpenAI Group. Both are headquartered in California but incorporated in Delaware. A public benefit corporation is a business that must consider interests beyond shareholders, such as those of society and the environment, and it must issue an annual benefit report to its shareholders and the public. However, it is up to the board to decide how to weigh those interests and what to report in terms of the benefits and harms caused by the company. The new structure is described in a signed in October 2025 by OpenAI and the California attorney general, and endorsed by the Delaware attorney general. Many business media outlets heralded the move, predicting that it would usher in more investment. Two months later, SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, finalized a $41 billion investment in OpenAI. Changing its mission statement Most charities must file forms annually with the Internal Revenue Service with details about their missions, activities and financial status to show that they qualify for tax-exempt status. Because the IRS makes the forms public, they have become a way for nonprofits to signal their missions to the world. In its forms for 2022, OpenAI said its mission was to build general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. OpenAIs mission statement as of 2023 included the word safely. IRS via Candid That mission statement has changed, as the company filed with the IRS in late 2025. It became to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. OpenAIs mission statement as of 2024 no longer included the word safely. IRS via Candid OpenAI had dropped its commitment to safety from its mission statement along with a commitment to being unconstrained by a need to make money for investors. According to Platformer, a tech media outlet, it has also disbanded its mission alignment team. In my view, these changes explicitly signal that OpenAI is making its profits a higher priority than the safety of its products. To be sure, OpenAI continues to mention safety when it discusses its mission. We view this mission as the most important challenge of our time, it states on its website. It requires simultaneously advancing AIs capability, safety, and positive impact in the world. Revising its legal governance structure Nonprofit boards are responsible for key decisions and upholding their organizations mission. Unlike private companies, board members of tax-exempt charitable nonprofits cannot personally enrich themselves by taking a share of earnings. In cases where a nonprofit owns a for-profit business, as OpenAI did with its previous structure, investors can take a cut of profits but they typically do not get a seat on the board or have an opportunity to elect board members, because that would be seen as a conflict of interest. The OpenAI Foundation now has a 26% stake in OpenAI Group. In effect, that means that the nonprofit board has given up nearly three-quarters of its control over the company. Software giant Microsoft owns a slightly larger stake 27% of OpenAIs stock due to its $13.8 billion investment in the AI company to date. OpenAIs employees and its other investors own the rest of the shares. Seeking more investment The main goal of OpenAIs restructuring, which it called a recapitalization, was to attract more private investment in the race for AI dominance. It has already succeeded on that front. As of early February 2026, the company was in talks with SoftBank for an additional $30 billion and stands to get up to a total of $60 billion from Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft combined. OpenAI is now valued at over $500 billion, up from $300 billion in March 2025. The new structure also paves the way for an eventual initial public offering, which, if it happens, would not only help the company raise more capital through stock markets but would also increase the pressure to make money for its shareholders. OpenAI says the foundations endowment is worth about $130 billion. Those numbers are only estimates because OpenAI is a privately held company without publicly traded shares. That means these figures are based on market value estimates rather than any objective evidence, such as market capitalization. When he announced the new structure, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, We secured concessions that ensure charitable assets are used for their intended purpose. He also predicted that safety will be prioritized and said the top priority is, and always will be, protecting our kids. Steps that might help keep people safe At the same time, several conditions in the OpenAI restructuring memo are designed to promote safety, including: A safety and security committee on the OpenAI Foundation board has the authority to that could potentially include the halting of a release of new OpenAI products based on assessments of their risks. The for-profit OpenAI Group has its own board, which must consider only OpenAIs mission rather than financial issues regarding safety and security issues. The OpenAI Foundations nonprofit board gets to appoint all members of the OpenAI Groups for-profit board. But given that neither the mission of the foundation nor of the OpenAI group explicitly alludes to safety, it will be hard to hold their boards accountable for it. Furthermore, since all but one board member currently serve on both boards, it is hard to see how they might oversee themselves. And doesnt indicate whether he was aware of the removal of any reference to safety from the mission statement. Identifying other paths OpenAI could have taken There are alternative models that I believe would serve the public interest better than this one. When Health Net, a California nonprofit health maintenance organization, converted to a for-profit insurance company in 1992, regulators required that 80% of its equity be transferred to another nonprofit health foundation. Unlike with OpenAI, the foundation had majority control after the transformation. A coalition of California nonprofits has argued that the attorney general should require OpenAI to transfer all of its assets to an independent nonprofit. Another example is The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Pennsylvania newspaper became a for-profit public benefit corporation in 2016. It belongs to the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit. This structure allows Philadelphias biggest newspaper to attract investment without compromising its purpose journalism erving the needs of its local communities. Its become a model for potentially transforming the local news industry. At this point, I believe that the public bears the burden of two governance failures. One is that OpenAIs board has apparently abandoned its mission of safety. And the other is that the attorneys general of California and Delaware have let that happen. Alnoor Ebrahim is a professor of international business at The Fletcher School & Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Those in steady employment in 2026 might feel like they won the lottery, as the number of job openings dwindles at the same time as layoffs continue to hit. This has caused some recruiters to shift their focus from employers to the unemployed: Instead of companies hiring recruiters to find and place talent, job seekers are now the ones enlisting recruiter services to help get a foot in the door, coughing up hefty fees (either a flat rate or a cut of the candidates first-year salary once they land a job). The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the trend which has come to be known as reverse recruitment. One boutique agency the Journal spoke with, The Reverse Recruiting Agency, charges $1,500 per month, plus 10% of first-year salary upon job acceptance, at which time they will refund the first months fee. Their services include customized résumés (with zero AI-written slop), hiring manager outreach, LinkedIn profile and résumé optimization, and networking support. Their promise? Nine interviews in the first three months, or your money back. Refer is another reverse recruitment agency that connects talent directly with hiring managers using an AI agent, Lia. Lia is currently making 20-plus introductions daily between candidates and hiring managers who have already expressed interest in their profiles. The cost of landing a job with Refer will set new hires back 20% of their first months paycheck. As sites like LinkedIn are flooded with applications and employers rely on AI résumé screeners, applicants are increasingly seeking alternative ways to get their profiles in front of the right people. Theres also those offering these services for less on gig platforms, like Fiverr. But for those with the means, or those desperate enough, spending a few thousand dollars to not have to suffer the indignities of the job hunt may seem like a fair deal. Looking for a job is a time-consuming and often ego-bruising taskespecially considering one in four unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, are still job hunting six months later. A low-hire, low-fire environment means that, while the current unemployment rate isnt all that bad, for those out of work it’s incredibly difficult to land a job. Roughly one million more people are seeking work than there were available jobs as of December, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by Indeed. Many job seekers employing the services of reverse recruiters may have been unemployed for monthsat which point theyve exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, which replace less than 40% of a persons previous income on average. Here, pay-to-play hiring is a worrying trend and a sign of a bleak job market. When job seekers are made to shoulder the financial burden of their own recruitment, without guaranteed results, it shifts the risk from employers to the unemployed, many of whom will already be under immense strain and stress. Lets call this what it is: predatory marketing wrapped in career coaching language, a résumé writer and former recruiter, Sarah Johnston, posted on LinkedIn. This is a dark space, don’t do it, founding partner of executive search firm Cowen Partners, Shawn Cole also posted. ”Reverse-recruiter models” are not real or reputable recruiting firms. They are résumé spammers. He added: Your résumé and livelihood shouldnt be treated like spam.
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E-Commerce
It’s hard to tell AI news from AI hype at the best of times, but the most recent surge around agents, triggered by many developers embracing Claude Code a couple of months ago, feels like something different. With the viral freakout over Moltbook, the agent social network, and the Super Bowl ad slap fight between OpenAI and Anthropic, AI has escalated to a new level of mainstream attention. Everyone’s forgotten about the AI bubble and is instead dancing around the AI “inflection point,” when AI in general and agents in particular begin to take over huge swaths of knowledge work, with massive consequences for the economy and the workforce. The recent sell-off of SaaS stocks is an indication of how seriously the industry takes this. For journalists, all this mainstream AI noise, coupled with the steady drumbeat of layoffs in the media industry, quickly turns into a familiar feeling: pressure to do more. As newsrooms shrink and AI tools get framed as productivity machines, its easy to assume the right response is higher output. But AI isnt just changing how stories get made. Its changing how stories get found. So the temptation to use AI to do “more with less,” which in many cases will be to tell the same kinds of stories, just more quickly and more often, is misguided. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} This is because of the contradiction in how AI systems surface information: While they look for sameness to reinforce the patterns they’re seeing, they don’t reward it. That’s the difference between being cited in an AI summary vs. being in the background. AI only needs one competent version of the commodity story; it goes looking for the one that looks authoritative and adds something new. More isnt more In practice, yes, you could use AI to accelerate news production, letting you cover more stories than you could before, and a few newsrooms are doing that. And on an individual level, that might even signal your value to your employer in the short term. But if it’s effectively the same story reported elsewhere, an AI engine has no reason to prioritize yours over another. Instead, the more logical path is to invest in the parts of journalism that only humans can do: finding new and novel information through sourcing, research, interviews, and analysis. In other words, while the instinct to do more isn’t wrong, it should be aimed at going deeper, not wider. AI can still be an accelerant here, speeding up ideation, research, and even things like reaching out to sources. A digital media researcher, Nick Hagar, recently showed what this looks like in practice, using coding agents to recreate a deep analysis from a human-authored journalistic investigation on Virginia police decertifications. The interesting thing about his case study is that, when used with very specific tools (such as Claude Code “skills,” which essentially turn certain research tasks into templates), he could quickly replicate the work, but ultimately his human judgment was required throughout. “Even with skills enforcing a structured workflow, I made dozens of judgment calls…. Skills make the workflow more systematic; they dont eliminate the need for human attention,” he wrote. That points to the better way journalists should think about AI: The goal isn’t to create more stories, but to create stories that are so valuable and definitive that AI search engines can’t ignore them. Authority over output To succeed in this new environment, the No. 1 habit that journalists will need to break is the natural instinct to cover more. Very few reporters think they’ve got a full grip on all the stories on their beat, and as newsrooms shrink, they have less help than ever. It doesn’t mean you ignore all breaking news, but it does mean a mental shift from reaction to discernment. In many cases, that might mean narrowing a beat to a micro-beat (say, from “energy” to “nuclear power”). A lot of what I’m describing is happening naturally as many reporters, either victims of layoffs or entrepreneurially minded, flock to platforms like Substack and Beehiiv to put out a shingle. It’s not just the best-worst optionthe system is pushing incentives in this direction, rewarding people who build authority via content that goes deep in a specific subject area and brings original insights and information to the table. Certainly, you don’t have to strike out on your own to take this approach, though it does require discipline to put aside story FOMO and focus on where you can bring something original to the table. And the rewards go beyond simply having a better chance at surfacing in AI answers: you’ll have a stronger connection to your audience because they’ll be coming to you for information you can’t get anywhere else. The value of shaping narratives instead of chasing them is much greater than any short-term traffic spike. That’s a hopeful idea, and paired with the changing incentives of the media ecosystem, it points to a key insight. AI’s ability to summarize and transform content has caused many to wonder what the “atomc unit” of journalism is. Some think it’s the unique facts, quotes, or insights that are woven into stories, but I think all this implies it’s something more abstract: editorial judgment. As AI systems absorb more of the mechanical labor of journalism, theyre inadvertently clarifying the thing they cant absorb: human judgment about what matters and why. If this is an inflection point, it isnt in the tools. Its in the work we choose to do. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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