The OpenAI Files: A Comprehensive Report on Governance and Culture

For approximately a year, Tyler Johnston has been gathering public information regarding the internal operations of OpenAI. Over the past month, he has focused on compiling a report aimed at enhancing public understanding and visualization of this information.

The resulting report, titled The OpenAI Files, was released today. This initiative is a collaboration between the Midas Project and the Tech Oversight Project, both of which are nonprofit organizations dedicated to monitoring technology. The report is described as the “most comprehensive collection to date of documented concerns with governance practices, leadership integrity, and organizational culture at OpenAI.”

The interactive website associated with the report encompasses more than 50 pages and over 10,000 words. It chronicles OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit research laboratory to a prominent commercial entity, highlighting the safety concerns and potential conflicts of interest that have arisen during this transition. The report utilizes a variety of sources, including corporate disclosures, legal complaints, open letters, and media reports, which have been previously covered by The Verge and other news outlets as individual stories. These sources are now consolidated in one location. Additionally, the report features charts and data visualizations that elucidate OpenAI’s internal structure, including the nonprofits’ estimates of OpenAI’s corporate framework, its original capped-profit model, and the proposed restructuring plan.

A significant theme throughout the report is the extent to which OpenAI executives and board members may directly or indirectly benefit from the company’s achievements. The nonprofits provide insights into CEO Sam Altman’s investment portfolio, which includes a range of companies such as Retro Biosciences, Helion Energy, Reddit, Stripe, Rewind AI, and Rain AI. These companies currently have overlapping business interests with OpenAI, including partnerships, vendor relationships, or discussions regarding potential acquisitions.

Johnston, who serves as the executive director of The Midas Project, stated in an interview with The Verge that the project aims to highlight “the ways in which the vision that they had in the late 2010s departed from the way that they’re behaving today in 2025.” This observation underscores the evolving nature of OpenAI’s mission and practices.

The organizations behind the report emphasized that they did not receive any funding, assistance, editorial guidance, or support from Elon Musk, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, or any other competitor of OpenAI. They asserted that the report maintains “complete editorial independence.” OpenAI has chosen not to comment on the report.

“We’re in an archival project here, where we’re showing what OpenAI was like then, what they’re like now… We’re just putting that information in front of the reader and asking the reader to draw their own conclusions about what to make of it,” Johnston remarked to The Verge.

For those interested in exploring the findings, the report can be accessed at OpenAIFiles.org.