OpenAI and ChatGPT: A Full Look at the Company

OpenAI today: numbers that are hard to compare to anything else

In March 2026, OpenAI closed a funding round bringing in $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion — the second-highest valuation among private companies worldwide, behind only SpaceX. ChatGPT crossed 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, then hit 1 billion monthly active users by June 2026, according to 2026 OpenAI usage data.

Revenue has topped $2 billion a month, and 92% of Fortune 500 companies now use ChatGPT at work, per TechnologyChecker.io. OpenAI became the fastest technology platform in history to reach both 10 million and 100 million users.

From a nonprofit lab to a company worth most of a trillion dollars

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman among its co-founders, backed by roughly $1 billion in pledged capital, including contributions from Musk, Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Amazon Web Services, Wikipedia notes.

In early 2018, Musk proposed taking personal control of the company; the other co-founders refused, and Musk walked away, pulling back a large planned donation in the process, Time reports. Almost five years later, on November 30, 2022, the company released ChatGPT — and within the first five days, more than a million people had signed up, kicking off the AI race the industry is still living through.

In November 2023, OpenAI's board unexpectedly removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a loss of confidence — only to reinstate him five days later after the board itself was restructured, CNBC notes.

The Musk lawsuit: an attempt to unwind the for-profit shift entirely

In February 2024, Elon Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing the company of abandoning its nonprofit mission for profit; by April 2026, he'd amended the suit to demand the court reverse OpenAI's entire conversion into a for-profit structure. A jury was seated on April 27, 2026, and on May 18, 2026, it returned a verdict in favor of OpenAI, Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft — Musk's attorney has already said he'll appeal, Wikipedia reports.

The product: what the GPT-5.6 lineup actually changed

On June 27, 2026, OpenAI released a new model generation in limited preview — GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna — replacing GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.5, both already retired from ChatGPT by that point, TechCrunch notes. As Sam Altman put it, "probably the thing we do that, at least historically, has had the most impact on the world is how we set the ChatGPT personality," given that 900 million people talk to that same personality every week, The AI Corner quotes him as saying.

Beyond the chatbot itself, OpenAI has built a full ecosystem around it for developers and businesses: Codex for writing and reviewing code, an API platform that thousands of third-party apps run on, and a ChatGPT Enterprise tier — the last of which explains why more than 9 million paying business users keep using ChatGPT day to day, rather than just trying it once.

The ranking: dominance that's slowly narrowing

ChatGPT remains the most downloaded app in the world and consistently sits at the top of the App Store, including bouncing back after a controversial Pentagon deal in early March 2026, 9to5Mac notes. But its market share is slipping: between January 2025 and January 2026, ChatGPT's share of daily US AI-chat users fell from 69.1% to 45.3%, while Google's Gemini grew from 14.7% to 25.1%, and Anthropic's Claude has solidified itself as another serious alternative — we broke down all five in our 2026 top-5 AI services comparison.

Criticism and the world's reaction: two parallel legal fronts

The first front is The New York Times' copyright lawsuit: in January 2026, a court ordered OpenAI to hand over the full sample of 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs, rejecting the company's attempt to limit disclosure to conversations that directly referenced the paper's articles, ABA Journal reports. The judge held that even logs without direct copying matter, since they bear on whether ChatGPT's answers substitute for the paper's original journalism, National Law Review notes.

The second front concerns alleged real-world harm: in Raine v. OpenAI, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine allege ChatGPT failed to steer their son away from suicide and, in places, gave him specific details. In June 2026, Florida became the first US state to sue OpenAI and Altman, arguing the company put profit ahead of warning users — including minors — about the risks, SocialMediaVictims.org notes. OpenAI's official statement read: "Our deepest sympathies are with the Raine family for their unimaginable loss," pledging to keep training its models to recognize signs of emotional distress and point people toward real-world support, according to OpenAI's own blog.

Bottom line: a company winning the market and losing its monopoly at the same time

OpenAI is still the largest player in consumer AI by revenue, users, and the sheer pace of model releases. But 2026 shows two things happening at once: rising competition (Gemini and Claude are both eating into its share) and mounting legal pressure on two separate fronts — copyright and minor safety. Investor appetite for OpenAI as a company has already spilled into its own financial product — Coinbase now lets people trade OpenAI shares ahead of any IPO. For the market, that means one thing: ChatGPT's dominance is no longer something to take for granted by default — it now has to be re-earned through both the product and the company's reputation.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.