OpenAI: An Ambitious Foundation to Transform the Future of AI

OpenAI: An Ambitious Foundation to Transform the Future of AI

March 24, 2026

Last year, OpenAI reached a significant milestone by announcing a major recapitalization. This initiative has allowed the OpenAI Foundation to access considerable financial resources, paving the way for ambitious projects. Today, we explore how this Foundation is beginning to realize this financial support.

A Mission for Humanity

The primary mission of the OpenAI Foundation is to ensure that general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. This mission is complex and multifaceted. AI is already transforming how people work, learn, and access healthcare. It has the potential to bring extraordinary benefits, such as faster medical advancements, accelerated scientific discoveries, more personalized healthcare and education services, new tools for creativity and invention, increased productivity, enhanced economic growth, and improved public services like transportation systems.

Since its inception, OpenAI has been guided by the belief that AI can achieve this potential. However, developing powerful systems that serve humanity is only part of our mission. Advanced AI models also pose new challenges that are already beginning to emerge. We must be ready to identify them and develop solutions to address them.

The Foundation focuses on two main dimensions: enabling the use of AI to solve humanity's most complex problems and transforming individual capabilities, while closely working with partners to anticipate new challenges and strengthen societal resilience as AI progresses.

This work is just beginning. Over the coming year, as we rapidly scale up, the Foundation plans to invest at least $1 billion in life sciences, economic opportunities, security, and community programs. These investments are the first steps toward the $25 billion we announced.

In the coming months, we will share advancements in each of these areas as we build, learn, and refine our approach, and advance our mission through new grants and programs.

Life Sciences and Disease Fighting

We start with life sciences and disease fighting, areas where we believe AI has considerable potential to accelerate scientific and medical progress to save and improve lives. We are already seeing early signs of AI's capabilities in these fields. Researchers are using AI to better understand diseases, explore new ways to prevent and treat them, and accelerate the transition of ideas from the lab to patients.

Within the Foundation, we have identified three initial priority areas where we believe this work can make a real difference:

• AI for Alzheimer's Disease: Alzheimer's disease is one of the most challenging and distressing diseases families face, and one of the most complex challenges in medicine. AI's ability to reason from complex data could help researchers uncover new avenues. We will collaborate with leading research institutions, initially focusing on mapping the mechanisms of the disease, detecting biomarkers for clinical care and clinical trials, and accelerating the personalization of treatments, including, when possible, repurposing molecules already approved by the FDA.

• Public Data for Health: Many of the greatest advancements in medicine have been made possible through the sharing of scientific data, and public access to data is essential to realize AI's potential for scientific discoveries. We will help our partners create and enrich open, high-quality datasets, and, where relevant, responsibly open previously closed datasets so that researchers worldwide can leverage AI and use the data to advance disease research.

• Accelerating Progress on High-Mortality and High-Burden Diseases: We believe AI can contribute to major scientific advancements and reduce the cost and risks associated with developing or repurposing treatments, particularly in areas of high-mortality and high-burden diseases that are still underfunded. We will bring together AI researchers and disease experts, starting with a targeted workshop to identify how to better equip scientists with AI and uncover promising opportunities.

Jacob Trefethen will lead this work as the head of life sciences and disease fighting. He joins us from Coefficient Giving, where he oversaw over $500 million in grants dedicated to science and health.

Jobs and Economic Impact

AI will transform the nature of work and the economy, bringing both challenges and opportunities. We recognize that this is of paramount importance. The Foundation has begun collaborating with experts and communities, including civil society organizations, small businesses, labor unions, leading economists, public policymakers, and others, to develop and fund concrete solutions in this area. We plan to mobilize significant resources to support the most promising approaches and will share more information in the coming weeks.

Resilience in the Face of AI

As previously announced, resilience in the face of AI will also be one of our core programs. This work focuses on the new challenges that inevitably emerge with more powerful AIs, so that everyone can fully benefit from AI in a way that supports and enhances human autonomy, creativity, and opportunities.

Initially, we will focus on a few areas where concerns about impact are already evident and where we believe early actions can make a real difference:

• Impact of AI on Children and Youth: We want to help ensure that AI tools are safe for young people and promote healthy development. This includes investments in data-driven research and evaluation, as well as cross-disciplinary work to identify appropriate safeguards to ensure safe and beneficial interactions between AI and children and youth.

• Biosecurity: We want to strengthen society's preparedness for potential biological threats, whether from natural epidemics or those facilitated by AI. This includes improving detection, prevention, and mitigation.

• AI Model Safety: We want AI systems to be safer by default. This means conducting independent testing and assessments, developing new, more robust industry standards, and funding foundational research that helps avoid security issues or detect and address them upstream.

Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI, joins the Foundation as the head of AI resilience to lead this work.

Supporting Communities

We will soon announce the latest wave of grants from the initial People-First AI Fund, along with more details on what’s next. Through this work, launched on the recommendation of our Nonprofit Organizations Commission, we have found that community-based organizations are particularly well-positioned to help individuals adapt to the transformations brought about by AI. These trusted organizations are closest to the communities they serve and carry out essential actions on the ground.

We will continue to invest in initiatives that support communities, focusing on helping individuals understand AI, leverage its capabilities, and adapt to the changes it brings.

Building Our Team

In addition to Wojciech and Jacob, we are building a team to advance our work at scale.

Anna Makanju joins the Foundation as the head of AI for civil society and philanthropy to lead efforts to leverage AI to help nonprofit organizations, NGOs, and philanthropic institutions accelerate and amplify their impact. Anna previously served as Vice President of Global Impact at OpenAI.

Robert Kaiden joins the organization as Chief Financial Officer. Robert has previously held senior leadership positions at Deloitte, Twitter, and Inspirato. He will help ensure that the Foundation operates with rigorous financial discipline as we grow.

Jeff Arnold joins the organization as Chief Operating Officer. Jeff was one of the early members of OpenAI. He has dedicated his career to building and scaling companies, including leadership roles at Oracle and Dropbox. He will help establish the operational systems necessary to support the Foundation's goals.

The Foundation's Board is also seeking a Chief Executive Officer. We will continue to recruit in the coming months.

What’s Next?

We are just at the beginning of what we have planned.