OpenAI Alters Mission Amid Fierce Competition
OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission statement, raising questions about its balance between innovation and responsibility. The change comes as rival Anthropic reportedly raises $30 billion in a new funding round. Concurrently, OpenAI has accused Chinese AI firm DeepSeek of improperly using its technology to train competing models.
- OpenAI's new corporate structure is a for-profit Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) controlled by its original nonprofit foundation. Following an October 2025 restructuring, Microsoft holds a 27% stake in the PBC, the OpenAI Foundation holds 26%, and the remaining 47% is owned by employees and other investors. - Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, who was OpenAI's Vice President of Research, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, who serves as President. - Anthropic's $30 billion Series G funding round resulted in a post-money valuation of $380 billion. The round was co-led by multiple firms including D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC. - The company's annual run-rate revenue has reached $14 billion, growing more than 10x annually over the past three years. A significant driver of this growth is Claude Code, its AI coding assistant, which now accounts for a run-rate revenue of over $2.5 billion. - In a memo to the U.S. House Select Committee on China, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of using a technique called "distillation," where one AI model's outputs are used to train another, in an effort to "free ride" on the capabilities of American models. - The memo alleges that DeepSeek employees developed code and used "obfuscated third-party routers" to circumvent OpenAI's access restrictions and programmatically collect model outputs for training. - The accusation followed earlier praise from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who, after the release of DeepSeek's R1 model in 2025, had called it "impressive" and stated it was "legit invigorating to have a new competitor."
