The evolution of OpenAI's mission statement

This article tracks how OpenAI's official mission statement, filed annually with the IRS (the U.S. tax authority), changed between 2016 and 2024. Over time, OpenAI removed mentions of openly sharing capabilities, dropped the phrase "as a whole" from "benefit humanity," shifted from wanting to "help" build safe AI to committing to "develop and responsibly deploy" it themselves, and eventually cut the mission down to a single sentence focused on ensuring artificial general intelligence (AI systems designed to handle any task a human can) benefits all of humanity, while notably removing any mention of safety.