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Sam Altman
CEO and co-founder, OpenAI
Sam Altman is co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI. He co-founded the organization in December 2015 as a nonprofit alongside Greg Brockman, Elon Musk and others, and became CEO in 2019 when he left Y Combinator to run it full time.
Before OpenAI, Altman co-founded the location app Loopt, which was sold in 2012, and joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011. He served as president of the accelerator from 2014 to 2019. He has also chaired the fusion company Helion Energy and co-founded Tools for Humanity, the company behind the Worldcoin identity project.
In November 2023 OpenAI’s board removed Altman as CEO, citing a lack of candor; after staff and investor pressure he returned five days later with a reconstituted board chaired by Bret Taylor. In October 2025 OpenAI completed a recapitalisation under which the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation controls a public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC. In 2026 a federal jury rejected Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, finding the claims time-barred.
Altman has repeatedly used the term Super Intelligence in describing OpenAI’s direction. In a January 2025 post on his personal blog he wrote that OpenAI was “beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word,” and that “superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery.” He has not claimed the company has built such a system.
Under his leadership OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the GPT model family, and in September 2026 began rolling out GPT-6 Astra.