“One of the best-resourced philanthropic organizations ever.” That was how OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor described the OpenAI Foundation when the artificial intelligence behemoth behind ChatGPT restructured as a public benefit corporation last year. On paper, Taylor was certainly correct: The move meant that the nonprofit that controlled OpenAI, now the OpenAI Foundation, received an equity stake worth $130 billion at the time, far above the assets of even the Gates Foundation. As of the restructuring, the OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit entity OpenAI Group.
There are still a lot of big changes afoot: In June 2026, OpenAI filed confidentially to go public, though it says the timing is undecided. A charity steering a company through an IPO is an unusual arrangement, and while it’s unclear how OpenAI’s valuation might look post-IPO, another recent landmark tech IPO suggests the totals may be very large indeed.
But on the ground, the OpenAI Foundation is still getting its feet wet. Grants have begun to flow through its People-First AI Fund, comprising an initial $40.5 million announced last December, $9.5 million this June, and plans for another $50 million to go out later in 2026.
Its broader ambitions have much larger numbers attached: Taylor has gestured toward $1 billion in 2026 “across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs.” This spring, the foundation announced a forthcoming $100 million in life sciences and disease grants, with a focus on Alzheimer’s; that it’s “working to finalize” over $130 million in AI resilience grants; and that it’s committing an initial $250 million to build “secure and abundant economic futures.” Meanwhile, the foundation has set a larger commitment of $25 billion toward curing disease and AI resilience.
The people who will decide how that money will be spent consist of two groups: a board of directors that governs the foundation, and a staff being hired to run its programs. Most of the directors also sit on the board of the company the charity is meant to hold to its mission, which has raised concerns among AI watchdog groups. Given OpenAI’s seismic impact right now, and the sheer quantity of potential philanthropic cash involved, who’s running the show here is a pressing question for the social sector. Here are 12 people to know.
1. The executive director — the most important hire OpenAI hasn’t made
Start with the empty seat. The OpenAI board is still searching for an executive director to run the philanthropy. OpenAI announced the search in March 2026 and, as of mid-2026, has named no one. It has hired the people who would report to that executive director, including a chief financial officer, Robert Kaiden, who came from Deloitte, Twitter and Inspirato; and a director of operations, Jeff Arnold, an early OpenAI employee who later led teams at Oracle and Dropbox. Until the role is filled, the $130 billion charity will be steered by its board and a staff still introducing itself.
2. Bret Taylor — the board chair
A career Silicon Valley operator who was co-CEO of Salesforce and now runs the AI startup Sierra, Taylor chairs the OpenAI Foundation’s board and also sits on the board of OpenAI Group, the for-profit the foundation controls. Under OpenAI’s current structure, the foundation appoints every OpenAI director and can replace them at any time, and every foundation director but one also holds a vote on the company’s board. Taylor has argued that this structure keeps “mission-focused governance” at the center. His own giving is still fairly modest and local: He and his wife, Karen, are the lead donors to Lafayette Partners in Education, the nonprofit behind their California hometown’s public schools, with a $5 million gift to its endowment.
3. Sam Altman — the CEO who also helps govern the charity
Altman runs OpenAI as chief executive and sits on the foundation’s board. That overlap has drawn some of the sharpest questions about the charity’s independence, since the person leading the company is also helping govern the nonprofit that holds the company to its mission. He holds no equity in OpenAI himself; his fortune sits in some 400 other companies. Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, signed the Giving Pledge in 2024, and he gave a reported $14 million of his own money to a basic-income study at OpenResearch, the research nonprofit he backs, reflecting a long preoccupation with cushioning AI’s economic fallout. As IP’s Mike Scutari put it, “Altman’s public giving so far — and especially his support for UBI — has been less about creating the ‘abundance’ he referenced in his Giving Pledge letter and more about addressing the messes that AI will cause.”
4. Sue Desmond-Hellmann — the director who ran the Gates Foundation
An oncologist who led development of the first gene-targeted cancer drugs at Genentech and later was chancellor of UC San Francisco, Desmond-Hellmann ran the Gates Foundation as CEO from 2014 to 2020. She joined OpenAI’s board of directors in 2024. One focus for her as head of the Gates Foundation was what she called “precision public health”: using data and technology to carry health gains to the people markets ignore. She has described health itself as a driver of equality. Her philanthropic record maps onto the OpenAI Foundation’s interests in life sciences and curing disease, and for health funders or grantseekers, she’s a big name on this board to know.
5. Adam D’Angelo — Quora’s CEO and the board’s longest-serving director
Of the board that briefly ousted Altman in November 2023 and then brought him back, D’Angelo is the only member who still holds a seat. The chief executive of Quora and a former chief technology officer of Facebook, he sits on the board’s Safety and Security Committee, which reviews OpenAI’s models and can require fixes, or delays, before one ships.
6. Paul Nakasone — the former spy chief
A retired army general, Nakasone led the National Security Agency and was the longest-serving head of U.S. Cyber Command before joining the OpenAI board in June 2024. He’s also on the board’s Safety and Security Committee. His expertise lines up with the foundation’s stated focus on AI resilience, particularly around biosecurity and model safety. Since leaving government, he has built a second career in national security education, founding Vanderbilt’s Institute for National Defense and Global Security, where he says he wants “policymakers who can code, and coders who understand policy.”
7. Zico Kolter — the safety researcher
Zico Kolter, an independent director on the board, runs the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon and chairs the board’s Safety and Security Committee. Alone among the OpenAI Foundation directors, Kolter holds no vote on the company’s board, attending only as a nonvoting observer. OpenAI says a second director will join him in that role within a year. A specialist in AI safety and the robustness of machine learning systems, he frames the work broadly. The Safety and Security Committee, he has said, is “not just talking about existential concerns here” but “the entire swath of safety and security issues” raised by the widespread use of AI.
8. Adebayo Ogunlesi — the financier
Ogunlesi is the board’s finance and investing expert. A Lagos-born dealmaker who spent more than two decades at Credit Suisse, he founded Global Infrastructure Partners, acquired by BlackRock in 2024, and joined the OpenAI board in January 2025. Ogunlesi’s background comes to bear on the foundation’s defining financial question: Its endowment is a single, illiquid stake in a company, which, in theory at least, should eventually become money that reaches grantees. As we’ve reported, Ogunlesi is also an active donor on his own, giving through a family foundation he started in 2019, currently a modest operation with about $17.5 million in assets in 2024, backing education, the arts and addiction recovery.
9. Nicole Seligman — the crisis lawyer
Seligman is the board’s legal and crisis management hand. A litigator who clerked for Thurgood Marshall and helped defend President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, she became general counsel of Sony, where she managed the fallout from the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures. OpenAI added her and Desmond-Hellmann in March 2024 for experience “navigating complex regulatory environments.” Outside her legal career, she’s co-chair of the board at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center and chairs the board of The Doe Fund, which helps homeless and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers.
10. Jacob Trefethen — the life sciences grantmaker
Trefethen, who runs the foundation’s life sciences and curing diseases program, came from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), where he directed more than $500 million in science and health grants. In his former role, he described his work in the language of the effective altruism movement: Fund the neglected problems where a dollar can save or improve the most lives. At Open Philanthropy, he backed work on omega-3 for malnourished children, sickle-cell screening, and a strep A vaccine; he notes that strep A is a disease that kills 600,000 people a year.
11. Wojciech Zaremba — the AI resilience lead
Zaremba, one of OpenAI’s cofounders, runs the foundation’s AI resilience program, whose stated intention is to brace society for the risks of advanced AI — including the kind OpenAI builds. He says the program is finalizing more than $130 million in grants, not yet disbursed, across biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and AI’s effect on children. “No general purpose technology ever made itself safe,” he wrote in June 2026. Zaremba has pushed publicly for rival labs to test one another’s models for safety, even amid the industry’s fierce competition for talent and customers.
12. Anna Makanju — the nonprofit AI adoption lead
Anna Makanju, who joined the foundation in April 2026 to run its work on AI for civil society and philanthropy, has spent much of her career at the nexus between technologists and governments. After national security roles at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, and stints at SpaceX and Facebook, she ran global policy and then global impact at OpenAI. Her program at the OpenAI Foundation is less about writing checks than about getting AI tools and training into the nonprofit world. She has traced her drive to her mother’s death from cancer after being denied coverage for a preexisting condition; born in Soviet Russia to a Ukrainian mother and Nigerian father, she waited tables before Stanford Law.
This article was written with assistance from AI.
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