ChatGPT Was Built by OpenAI and It Remains in Control

ChatGPT was not conjured out of thin air, either. It was created by OpenAI, the research organization that developed GPT and its larger language model relatives. And three years later, despite securing numerous big-name partners and millions in outside funding, the chatbot is still under OpenAI’s control. Who made ChatGPT, who owns it today, and why company structure matters. The people behind GPT-3 are some of the most active individuals in making GPT-3 projects, including OpenAI.

Who Built ChatGPT and How the Model Was Developed

The technology was developed by OpenAI, the organization that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba created in 2015 with researchers including John Schulman and Elon Musk. The team spent years iterating on the GPT series, which used large-scale pretraining combined with reinforcement learning from human feedback to generate more helpful, safer responses. That research pipeline is the path that led to GPT-3 in 2020, turbocharged image generation with DALL·E in 2021, and ultimately resulted in the conversational ChatGPT release at the end of 2022.

The result was historic adoption. Analysts at UBS estimated that ChatGPT was able to quickly achieve 100M MAU within two months, and for them, what mattered was the step change in language model capabilities.

Who Owns ChatGPT Today and How Governance Works

ChatGPT is the possession of OpenAI LP, a “capped-profit” limited partnership which manages OpenAI’s commercial holdings. But governance itself rests with OpenAI’s nonprofit parent (OpenAI Inc.), which calls the shots for the partnership as the general partner. In practice, it means the nonprofit board hires leadership and controls “mission” and policy; investors and employees have economic interests with capped returns.

This hybrid structure is unusual in tech, but reflects OpenAI’s effort to strike a balance between safety-first research and the capital-intensive nature of frontier AI. Reported secondary share sales in recent years suggested valuations far above the average startup, while preserving the nonprofit’s ability to steer the operations.

Where Microsoft Fits in the OpenAI Partnership

Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest outside partner and investor. It pledged $1 billion in 2019 and then followed that with a multibillion-dollar deal in 2023, frequently reported to be around $10 billion. In that partnership, OpenAI gets to use Microsoft’s Azure supercomputing infrastructure — crucial for training and deploying large models — while Microsoft licenses OpenAI technology for products like Copilot.

Crucially, Microsoft does not own ChatGPT or OpenAI. The relationship buys capital, compute, and distribution — not governance. Even a temporary, non-voting board observer position that was announced after the 2023 governance crisis has been phased out post-termination in 2024 following a governance update — reaffirming that OpenAI’s nonprofit board actually has oversight.

The size of the tie-up reflects the cost profile of contemporary AI. Each ChatGPT interaction is estimated to cost at least a few cents in compute — an endless tab for consumer internet scale. Industry reporting from The Information has OpenAI’s annualized revenue in the billions, which signals that usage is being monetized via API access and premium plans, though the economics are a moving target as models get larger and more capable.

What About Elon Musk and His Ties to OpenAI’s Past

Elon Musk, an early co-founder and donor, left OpenAI’s board in 2018, and has no ownership or say at the organization now. He has been a vocal critic of OpenAI’s direction since ChatGPT’s release and has made his own AI play. Regardless, he left before the creation of ChatGPT and has no claim over the product or company behind it.

Who’s Really in Charge of the Tech at OpenAI

The for-profit LP owns and commercializes ChatGPT, but the nonprofit parent lays down the guardrails. The board picks leadership, signs off on big deals, and supervises safety and governance committees. It’s been put through the wringer with stress tests in leadership upheaval during 2023 and bolstered with governance changes as well as more independent directors, according to company statements.

Your ChatGPT Outputs Are Yours, With Caveats on IP

OpenAI’s user terms give users broad rights in what they output, but copyright law has not quite caught up. Works that are not created “with a minimal degree of creativity” due to their lack of meaningful human authorship “are not protectable,” the US Copyright Office has said. For pointy-haired companies, the upshot is that it’s a good idea to team AI with human creativity and keep notes about who created what when you care about IP protection.

The Bottom Line on Ownership, Governance, and Partners

OpenAI built ChatGPT, OpenAI owns it, and a nonprofit board controls where the company’s direction ultimately goes. Microsoft is an important investor and infrastructure partner, not the owner. For anyone who is trying to figure out who’s driving generative AI’s most visible product, that’s the governance map that matters today.