Sam Altman

Sam Altman is an entrepreneur born in Chicago, in the United States, in 1985. He studied computer science at Stanford University but left after two years, and in 2005 he co-founded Loopt, a company making an app that let people share their location with friends, and became its CEO. Loopt was one of the companies in the very first group funded in 2005 by Y Combinator, which gives money and advice to start-ups (newly founded small tech companies). In 2012 Loopt was sold to the financial services company Green Dot for $43.4 million in cash. In 2014 he became president of Y Combinator and led it until 2019.

When OpenAI was launched as a non-profit AI research organisation in December 2015, Altman and Elon Musk were its co-chairs. He became OpenAI's CEO in 2019, the same year OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary to help scale its research and services. On 30 November 2022 OpenAI released the conversational AI ChatGPT, and in October 2026 it said ChatGPT had more than 1 billion users (company-reported). On 17 November 2023 OpenAI's board removed him as CEO, saying he had not been 'consistently candid' in his communications with the board. Most employees signed a letter demanding that he be brought back, and on 29 November OpenAI formally announced that he had returned as CEO.

On 28 October 2025 OpenAI changed its structure so that the non-profit OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation (PBC: a company that must pursue a stated social purpose as well as profit). In September 2026 OpenAI released a new AI model, GPT-6 Astra. On the 23rd of that month, speaking at the United Nations Security Council, Altman warned of two risks: that AI moves so fast that people can no longer control it, and that power becomes concentrated in too few hands. He said models should not be trained unless there is an extremely strong case that they can be kept under human control, and proposed shared national and international standards for AI. TIME named the 'Architects of AI', including him, as its 2025 Person of the Year. As of October 2026 he is OpenAI's CEO and a member of the OpenAI Foundation board.