OpenAI crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue in March 2026, according to PYMNTS citing Reuters, as its chief executive, Sam Altman, completed a striking public evolution: from co-signer of an AI extinction warning in 2023 to the architect of what he now calls "the gentle singularity." The journey is documented in a paper trail of blog posts, Senate testimony, and corporate filings that reveals how Altman's framing of AI risk has shifted more explicitly than almost any other voice in the field.
From Nonprofit Safety Lab to Superintelligence Company
OpenAI was incorporated in 2015 as a nonprofit with a founding premise that artificial general intelligence posed existential risk and required a structure that prioritized humanity over profit. Altman joined as chief executive in 2019, and for several years amplified that framing directly. In May 2023, he co-signed a one-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety reading: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
One month later, Altman testified before the US Senate, calling for a federal licensing regime for frontier AI models and warning of the consequences if the technology went wrong. Both statements placed him squarely in the camp of researchers who argued that advanced AI warranted regulatory constraint, not just voluntary internal guardrails.
By June 2025, the register had changed substantially. In a 3,000-word essay titled "The Gentle Singularity", Altman described a coming inflection as "gradual and manageable" rather than catastrophic. He predicted that by 2026 AI systems would generate novel scientific insights autonomously, that by 2027 robots would perform meaningful real-world physical work, and that within a decade intelligence could be "too cheap to meter." He described OpenAI, for the first time in public writing, as "a superintelligence research company." As TechCrunch noted, the essay reframed the singularity not as a rupture to be feared but as a transition already under way.
The Safety Commitments That Contracted
Between those two public registers, OpenAI's internal safety infrastructure contracted while its commercial ambitions expanded. In mid-2023, the company pledged 20 percent of its total compute to a "superalignment" team charged specifically with preventing AI from causing "the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction." Reporting by The New Yorker, published in April 2026, found that the team received roughly 1 to 2 percent of total compute in practice and was ultimately dissolved. The investigation described Altman as having "repeatedly chosen to deprioritize safety commitments he publicly championed." OpenAI disputed characterizations in the report, but the departures of the superalignment team's co-leads in May 2024 were publicly confirmed by those executives at the time.