Nonprofit watchdogs publish ‘The OpenAI Files’

If you’ve tried keeping track of the boardroom drama, executive exits, and restructuring rumors around OpenAI over the last couple of years, you know it’s basically impossible to keep straight.

Now, someone put all those receipts into a single, massive dossier.

Two tech watchdog nonprofits, The Midas Project and the Tech Oversight Project, just launched an interactive site called The OpenAI Files. Led by Tyler Johnston, who spent about a year gathering public records, the project spans more than 50 pages and over 10,000 words breaking down the company's inner workings.

Visualizing the corporate maze

The project markets itself as the most comprehensive collection yet of documented concerns regarding governance, executive integrity, and internal culture at OpenAI.

Instead of relying on anonymous leaks, the authors stitched together corporate disclosures, legal complaints, open letters, and investigative news reports into interactive charts.

Among the highlights is the team’s best attempt at mapping out OpenAI’s notoriously tangled corporate structure, charting its journey from a non-profit AI research lab to its capped-profit phase and proposed future restructuring.

Sam Altman’s personal portfolio under the microscope

A major focus of the dossier is how much leadership stands to gain from OpenAI's commercial boom, particularly CEO Sam Altman.

The report maps out Altman’s sprawling personal investment portfolio, highlighting companies like Helion Energy, Retro Biosciences, Reddit, Stripe, Rewind AI, and Rain AI.

The issue? Many of these ventures overlap directly with OpenAI’s day-to-day business, acting as vendors, strategic partners, or potential acquisition targets.

The authors stressed that they received zero funding, direction, or support from competitors like Elon Musk, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, or Microsoft. OpenAI declined to comment on the release.

Why it matters

We think the real value of The OpenAI Files isn’t breaking brand-new bombshells, but collecting scattered controversies into an undeniable timeline.

For anyone building on or paying for OpenAI's tech, it offers a sobering look at how far the organization has shifted from an open, safety-first lab to a standard corporate entity driven by aggressive expansion.

Altman’s dual role as both the face of OpenAI and a prolific venture capitalist with stakes in OpenAI’s own vendor ecosystem is an obvious red flag. As OpenAI continues to navigate its planned corporate restructuring and potential full-fledged for-profit conversion, putting these self-dealing risks in one easy-to-read archive creates serious public and regulatory pressure that the board won't be able to ignore.