Who Owns ChatGPT and OpenAI? AI Model Ownership Explained – tech.co
Over the last few years, ChatGPT has turned the business world on its head. Thanks to the innovative technology, generative AI has become a huge undertaking for virtually every company in the world, with platforms, services, and apps adding functionality in any way they can.
But who exactly owns the world’s most popular AI chatbot? OpenAI is the company behind the platform, but given the business’s many partnerships and deals, it’s safe to wonder who is actually pulling the strings.
In this guide, we’ll explain who owns ChatGPT and OpenAI, as well as offer some insight into what the company is up to in 2025.
In this guide:
ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory that was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other prominent figures, including Peter Thiel, Ilya Sutskever, Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman.
Sam Altman is the current sitting CEO of OpenAI and is understood to be the main contributor behind ChatGPT’s success.
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OpenAI is a Silicon Valley-based company that started out its journey generating artificial intelligence for video games and other apps. The company has since switched its focus to general AI research and development, creating Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) in 2018 — a unique language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text — and more advanced models GPT-2, 3, 4, and 5 in the years since.
OpenAI is also responsible for creating DALL-E, an AI system that generates realistic images from a language prompt, and Whisper, a speech recognition model that’s able to transcribe, identify, and translate 99 languages.
Another OpenAI product is the incredibly exciting – and arguably, terrifying – Sora, an AI-powered video generation app that is now into its second edition.
While Elon Musk co-founded ChatGPT and helped to financially back its mother company, OpenAI, in its early years, the ex-Twitter CEO doesn’t currently own stakes in the company.
Musk officially left OpenAI’s Board of Directors in 2018. In a Tweet the tech entrepreneur fired off in 2019, he cited a conflict of interest and prioritization of his other businesses, SpaceX and Tesla, as his primary reasons for distancing himself from the research company.
I had to focus on solving a painfully large number of engineering & manufacturing problems at Tesla (especially) & SpaceX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2019
However, a report from Semafor has since revealed that there may be a little more to the story.
According to several unnamed sources close to the matter, Musk tried to take over OpenAI because it had “fallen fatally behind Google,” only to be flat-out rejected by co-founder Greg Brockman and CEO Sam Altman.
After his proposal was jilted, Musk walked away from the company and cut all financial ties, despite promising to contribute $1 billion in funding over the course of several years. To recover these damages, OpenAI was forced to launch a “capped” for-profit model that still runs alongside its non-profit entity to this day.
But after its explosive success, have Elon Musk’s opinions changed about ChatGPT? It doesn’t look like it. In March 2023, Musk and other leading tech figures like Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak signed an open letter citing the dangers of rapidly developing AI like GPT-4, the language model powering ChatGPT.
However, despite his public concerns about AI, Musk has launched his own AI chatbot in the form of Grok, the AI model that is tied to the social media company he also owns, X (formerly Twitter).
Microsoft does not own ChatGPT, nor the chatbot’s founding company, OpenAI. However, the two companies have been partnered commercially since 2016, and Microsoft continues to be the company’s largest investor.
Microsoft invested $1 billion into the research lab in 2019, after the company made its partnership exclusive. Then, after the resounding successes of ChatGPT and OpenAI’s other products, Microsoft invested a further $10 billion in the company in January 2023, as they entered the third phase of their partnership. Overall investment by the tech giant totals around $13 billion.
In October 2025, reports began to surface that Microsoft was working on a deal that would see it rewarded with a 30% stake in the company.
OpenAI’s motivations are pretty obvious, but Microsoft also benefits heavily from this relationship. By investing in OpenAI, Microsoft is able to gain access to the lab’s cutting-edge technology, which it can then deploy across its broad range of products and services.
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