OpenAI’s history as a nonprofit research institute that also sells commercial products like ChatGPT may be coming to an end as the San Francisco company looks to more fully convert itself into a for-profit corporation accountable to shareholders.
The company’s board is considering a decision that would change the company into a public benefit corporation, according to a source familiar with the discussions who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about them.
While OpenAI already has a for-profit division, where most of its staff works, it is controlled by a nonprofit board of directors whose mission is to help humanity. That would change if the company converts the core of its structure to a public benefit corporation, which is a type of corporate entity that is supposed to help society as well as turn a profit.
How can it be a thing to just make a non profit organization into a for profit organization?
I thought non profits have benefits when it comes to taxation and regulations.
Why can it be allowed that the new for profit organization can just reap the rewards from those benefits that it used to grow into what it is now?
That seems to me like it should be plainly illegal.
Immediate back taxes on everything prior
That’s how it should work but not how it works.
It’s more like an open-source project going closed-source. They can do that at any time.