13th February 2026
As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to “Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities”—this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate if the organization is sticking to its mission and deserves to maintain its non-profit tax-exempt status.
You can browse OpenAI’s tax filings by year on ProPublica’s excellent Nonprofit Explorer.
I went through and extracted that mission statement for 2016 through 2024, then had Claude Code help me fake the commit dates to turn it into a git repository and share that as a Gist—which means that Gist’s revisions page shows every edit they’ve made since they started filing their taxes!
It’s really interesting seeing what they’ve changed over time.
