OpenAI Drops 'Safely' From Its Mission Statement
The company's latest IRS filing removes safety language that had been there since 2022. The same filing year covers OpenAI's restructuring into a for-profit company.
OpenAI's 2024 IRS Form 990, filed on November 18, 2025, and made public through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, contains a one-sentence mission statement: "To ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." In the previous year's filing, the mission read: "To build general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." Two things changed: the safety qualifier was removed, and the financial independence clause was dropped.
How the mission evolved over nine years
Simon Willison tracked all nine years of OpenAI's IRS filings through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer and documented how the mission statement changed each time.
The word "safely" was only in the mission for two filing years: 2022 and 2023. By 2024 it was gone, along with everything else.
The Form 990 is filed annually with the IRS by every 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The mission statement field describes the organization's exempt purpose. This is a change made in a legal regulatory filing, not marketing copy.
Alnoor Ebrahim, professor of international business at Tufts University, wrote in The Conversation that without safety in the mission, there is less to hold the board to. "Neither the mission of the foundation nor of the OpenAI group explicitly alludes to safety," he wrote, making it "hard to hold their boards accountable for it."
The 2024 filing, released in late 2025, coincided with OpenAI's restructuring into a public benefit corporation. OpenAI split into the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation (26% stake) and the for-profit OpenAI Group. Microsoft holds 27%. Separately, OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team; Joshua Achiam, who led alignment work, became "chief futurist."
OpenAI has not publicly commented on the mission statement change. The filings are public record, available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.
Back to 7min.ai