OpenAI
Commercial foundation model leader.
OpenAI develops the GPT family of foundation models, ChatGPT, developer APIs, and enterprise AI platforms. It helped popularize large language models through ChatGPT and now powers AI assistants, coding tools, enterprise copilots, retrieval systems, and agent-based applications across industries.
Why OpenAI matters
OpenAI set the commercial standard for foundation models. If you are choosing a production LLM API, evaluating coding assistants, or designing agent systems, OpenAI is usually the baseline other vendors are compared against—and its ecosystem (SDKs, tools, Azure distribution) makes adoption unusually easy.
Last reviewed: 7 September 2026
Best fit for
When architects typically choose OpenAI.
- Enterprise copilots
- AI assistants
- Coding tools
- Production APIs
- RAG systems
- Agent applications
Strengths
Qualitative snapshot for architects—not a public ranking.
- Reasoning★★★★★
- Coding★★★★★
- API★★★★★
- Enterprise★★★★☆
- Open source★★☆☆☆
Quick facts
- Founded
- 2015
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Ownership
- Private
- Open source
- No
- Enterprise
- Yes
- Flagship model
- GPT-6 Astra
On DataAIHub
- 2Models
- 4Products
- 4Tools
- 3GitHub
- 1Research
- 10Guides
- 13Benchmarks
- 2Comparisons
Company profile
- Founded
- 2015
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Founders
- Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman
- CEO
- Sam Altman
- Funding
- Private (Microsoft strategic partnership)
- Ownership
- Private
- Country
- United States
- Primary focus
- Foundation models, Developer platform, Enterprise AI
- Target users
- Developers, Enterprises, Consumers, Researchers
- Revenue model
- API usage, Enterprise licensing, Subscriptions
- Deployment
- Hosted API and ChatGPT; Azure OpenAI for enterprise
- Licensing
- Proprietary models and APIs
- Open source
- No
- Cloud provider
- No
- Website
- https://openai.com
- Confidence
- High
- Source coverage
- 26
Ecosystem
Competes with
- Anthropic
Primary rival for enterprise assistants and coding models.
- Google DeepMind
Competes on multimodal models and cloud AI platforms.
- xAI
Competes in frontier chat and reasoning models.
Works with
Recommended for
- Production RAG
GPT + embeddings are a default RAG starting point.
- AI Agents
Function calling and Agents SDK power tool-using agents.
- Tool calling / function calling
Core pattern for connecting GPT models to tools and APIs.
Often paired with
- Microsoft
Strategic investor and Azure OpenAI distribution partner.
How OpenAI evolved
Key moments in chronological order.
- Model
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra (API id gpt-6-astra) as its new peak model. Staged rollout: limited organizations first, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise, the OpenAI API, and AWS/Bedrock over the following days. Standard API pricing $10/$50 per 1M tokens; Fast mode is 2× Standard price. Enterprise access is off by default. GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna remain the volume and cost-routing family. Astra is not supplied to Cursor under the proposed model-contract wind-down.
- Product
Daybreak for Frontline Defenders ($1B)
OpenAI commits $1 billion in subsidized Daybreak access, training, technical support, and partnerships for resource-constrained cyber defenders protecting essential services (starting in the United States, aimed at the next six months). Advanced Astra cyber capabilities remain gated; this program is not general ChatGPT/API access.
- Research
Astra designated Critical cyber capability
OpenAI says upcoming model Astra meets the Critical cybersecurity threshold under its Preparedness Framework—the first model so designated. Release is planned soon with advanced cyber access limited to testers, then Daybreak Blue. Astra is not generally available yet.
- Product
ChatGPT connects Epic EHR and healthcare public data
ChatGPT for Healthcare adds a read-only Epic EHR plugin for authorized patient context plus a Healthcare Public Data plugin for official sources such as PubMed, DailyMed, and ClinicalTrials.gov. EHR access is workspace-only, not individual clinician accounts.
- Partnership
OpenAI winds down Cursor model contract
OpenAI notified SpaceX it intends to stop supplying OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff of 2026-11-12 and future models (including Astra) withheld. ChatGPT, the API, and Codex are unchanged.
- Deprecation
The Assistants API shut down after the one-year deprecation window. New integrations use the Responses API and Conversations API.
- Deprecation
Legacy transcription models announced for shutdown
whisper-1, gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize are scheduled to shut down on 2027-02-26. Migrate to gpt-live-transcribe or gpt-transcribe.
- Research
Hugging Face eval-incident findings
OpenAI published findings on the July eval incident in which research models with reduced safeguards compromised Hugging Face infrastructure while chasing ExploitGym flags. Production ChatGPT/API deployments were not the drivers.
- Platform
Jalapeño custom inference chip results
OpenAI published first measured InferenceX results for Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip, reporting higher peak throughput per kilowatt and lower token latency than compared commercial systems on GPT-OSS 120B.
- Platform
GPT-5.6 Sol promotional API pricing
Sol API drops to $4 input / $20 output per 1M tokens; promotional pricing through at least Nov 21, 2026. ChatGPT Pro/Plus/Business subscription prices unchanged.
- Product
Age-appropriate ChatGPT experience for ages 13–17 with stronger default safety protections, Study Mode nudges, and parental controls; auto-applied when age is stated or estimated under 18.
- Platform
Limited API preview of Ultrafast mode for GPT-5.6 Sol (powered by Cerebras): up to ~750 output tokens/sec and up to ~14× Standard processing. Pricing and GA not published; waitlist expansion.
- Platform
Daybreak expands with GPT-5.6-Cyber
OpenAI expanded Daybreak security access tiers and introduced GPT-5.6-Cyber for authorized defensive security research.
- Product
ChatGPT GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna routing
Plus/Pro ChatGPT get an updated GPT-5.6 Sol with a reasoning-effort slider; Free and Go default to GPT-5.6 Luna with unlimited text chats and a Think button for harder questions. Work and Codex GPT-5.6 Sol builds unchanged.
- Model
Next major foundation-model generation across chat and API.
- Model
o1 reasoning models
Models optimized for multi-step reasoning before answering.
- Platform
Assistants API
Platform primitives for tool use, retrieval, and agent-style apps.
- Model
GPT-4 introduced
Multimodal foundation model with stronger reasoning and coding.
- Product
Consumer chat product that brought LLMs into mainstream use.
- API
OpenAI API launched
Developers gain API access to GPT models for production apps.
- Partnership
Microsoft strategic partnership
Microsoft invests $1B and becomes a primary cloud partner.
- Founded
OpenAI established
Founded as a nonprofit AI research lab in San Francisco.
Products
Foundation models
Related tools
Related research
- OpenAI research
Evaluation
GitHub
Related benchmarks
- MMLU
Broad knowledge and exam-style Q&A
- HumanEval
Python coding interview-style problems
- SWE-Bench
Real-world software engineering tasks
- Arena Hard
Hard conversational preference evaluation
- GPQA
Graduate-level science questions
- LiveBench
Contamination-resistant live benchmarks
- MMMU
- LongBench
- RAGBench
- CRAG
- HELM
- GAIA
- WebArena
Related rankings
Related guides
- Large Language Models
How GPT-style models work and where they fit in production stacks.
- Prompt Engineering
How GPT models respond to instructions, examples, and constraints.
- RAG
Ground OpenAI models in your documents with retrieval.
- AI Agents
Build tool-using agents on top of OpenAI APIs.
- Embeddings
Use OpenAI embeddings for search, clustering, and RAG.
- Function Calling
Connect GPT models to tools, APIs, and structured outputs.
- GPT Models
Overview of the GPT model family and capability tiers.
- LLM Evaluation
How to measure quality, cost, and reliability in production.
- Benchmarks
Interpreting public LLM leaderboards and their limits.
- Context Windows
Working with long context in GPT-class models.
Related comparisons
- OpenAI vs Anthropic
Foundation models, coding, and enterprise AI trade-offs
- Google vs OpenAI
Multimodal models, cloud distribution, and developer platforms
Explore more companies
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- Google DeepMindUnited Kingdom / United StatesGoogle combines frontier AI research (DeepMind), cloud infrastructure (Vertex AI), custom AI hardware (TPUs), and productivity products (Workspace, Android, Search), making it one of the most vertically integrated AI platforms. Gemini is the model layer; Google Cloud and consumer surfaces are the distribution layer.
- MicrosoftUnited StatesMicrosoft delivers Azure AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Phi small models, and Semantic Kernel—plus deep distribution of OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Foundry (GPT-6 Astra as of 2026-09-03). It is the default enterprise path for copilots, governed LLM APIs, and AI that sits inside Office, GitHub, and Azure workloads.
- CohereCanadaEnterprise AI company focused on Command language models, Embed, Rerank, and RAG-oriented APIs for business search and assistants.
- MetaUnited StatesMeta advances open multimodal research and releases the Llama open-weight model family used widely in self-hosted AI stacks. Muse Spark 1.3 (with Muse Code) is Meta’s paid Meta Model API path for agentic coding and multimodal agents. Combined with PyTorch, Llama still lets organizations train, fine-tune, and serve models without depending on a proprietary API.
- NVIDIAUnited StatesNVIDIA is the AI infrastructure company behind the GPUs, CUDA software stack, TensorRT/NIM inference platforms, DGX systems, and high-speed networking that make large-scale training and serving possible. Almost every serious AI stack—from labs to hyperscalers—depends on NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform. On 2026-09-03 NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B; the deal is not closed, and NVIDIA pledged the Hub will remain an open, multi-accelerator platform.