OpenAI: Governance for Public Good or Private Gain? | CSI UWA webinar

OpenAI Inc is a household name as the creator of ChatGPT, an AI large language model that is revolutionising the way many of us work and play.

OpenAI Inc is also a nonprofit charity created under Delaware corporations law in 2015. As a charity, the governance duties of directors and officers and the supporting regulatory framework encourage a focus on OpenAI’s public purpose of ‘advancing digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return’. However, the computing resources required to build artificial digital intelligence have meant that OpenAI has needed enormous amounts of capital to continue developing its models. The need for capital has strained the public purpose mission as investors have sought financial returns, leading to OpenAI developing a social enterprise hybrid model for Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment, that placed a 100x return cap on the level of profit that could be made by investors. In October 2025, OpenAI undertook a further restructure that separated out the nonprofit component from a mixed for-profit/for-purpose component of its activities through the establishment of a public benefit corporation.

As part of the CSI UWA Research Webinar Series, this presentation will examine the structural changes at OpenAI with a view to examining the tensions it exposes for the governance and regulation of corporations that seek to pursue a purpose while also engaging in commercial activities and raising investment. This is timely as there has been a significant focus on corporate purpose over the last decade, via the work of The British Academy and, more locally, Rosemary Langford.

Speaker

Ian is a Professor in the Law School at the University of Western Australia, researching and teaching at the intersection between Not-for-profit Law, Tax and Corporate Governance. He has published widely on charity tax concessions, charity regulation, accumulation of assets by charities, tax administration and resource taxation from the perspectives of tax policy, equity, trusts, property law, corporations law and regulatory theory.Ian is chair of the board of the Charity Law Association of Australia and New Zealand, a member of the Law Council of Australia’s Charity and Not-for-profit Law Committee and a member of the Advisory Board for Australia’s charity regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.

• Date: Tuesday 13 October 2026
• Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm (AWST) - Presentation followed by Q&A
• Online only
• Free event but registration is essential to access the webinar