OpenAI Just Became America's Biggest Foundation. Now What?

OpenAI announced this week that their nonprofit now controls a $130 billion stake of the company, one of the largest philanthropic fortunes in America.

I spent a decade giving away hundreds of millions in corporate philanthropy. So I know what comes next.

Carnegie built libraries after crushing workers. Rockefeller funded Black colleges after extracting oil wealth.

The libraries still stand. So does the inequality.

Here's what makes OpenAI different. They didn’t extract oil or steel. They mined something more diffuse — every book ever written, every photo ever shared, every line of code ever posted — and turned it into private property.

As OpenAI establishes its foundation, the question I can't quite answer: Does the money us philanthropists help move to communities outweigh the permission we give the system to keep taking?

Most days, I don't know. But here’s what I do know.

The Window Is Closing

For decades, Silicon Valley had one primary advantage: they knew how to code. You didn't.

That's over.

What used to take a team of eight engineers nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars now takes one person with AI a few weeks. It's a special kind of magic.

As AI makes coding routine, what becomes valuable is judgment—knowing what's worth building because you've lived the problem.

But only if we move money and decision-making power to people close to real problems before all the wealth piles up in the same hands again.

What if capital, computing power, and control flowed to people with lived experience instead of computer science degrees?

Three OpenAI Moves That Would Actually Mean Something

1. Empower People Who Know Problems To Build Solutions

90-day programs where people close to real problems learn to direct AI to build tools. Not coding bootcamps. Not startup accelerators.

The social worker who's watched families fall through intake cracks for 15 years? Give her free access to AI, a session with OpenAI's team, and a safety review before launch.

2. Give Money That Comes Back

But don't just stop at product. Nothing gets built without capital. $25K-$100K grants to 20,000 ventures over the next two years. If they become sustainable, they pay it back and it funds the next group. If they don't, it converts to a gift.

I built Kindora—an AI fundraising platform for nonprofits—using AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code. Total cost to build and launch as a public benefit corporation: $60K. It's already serving hundreds of organizations that can't afford the $4,000/year platforms that give them thousands of overwhelming matches.

Traditional venture capital wants billion-dollar exits. Our community-led ventures might be $1-5M sustainable businesses serving users that desperately need them. That's not failure. That's success serving the right people.

3. Take the Risk Banks Won't

$500M to absorb the first losses on loans. When you take the first 10% hit, community banks like CDFIs will fund the next $5-10 billion.

That's building infrastructure that outlasts any single grant. Creating markets, not just funding companies.

Five Questions That Tell You If It's Real

Here are five questions to determine whether OpenAI is earning the legitimacy its philanthropy will bestow upon it:

1. When profit and purpose conflict, which wins? Not whether you "considered" community impact. Whether you can point to a specific decision where you chose community wellbeing over making more money.
2. Are you funding relief or changing the systems that create the need for relief? Charity eases suffering. Justice asks why people are suffering in the first place.
3. Do you measure social impact as seriously as you measure business results? Or is impact vague and directional while you track brand metrics to three decimal places?
4. When you fund innovation, are you solving for technology or solving for power? Are you funding apps or funding the messy work of shifting who gets to decide?
5. Do affected communities actually shape your work—or are you designing solutions for them? Getting close to people requires relationships that change you, not just programs you control.

The Choice Before Us

Taking OpenAI's money to run their philanthropy would mean your name, your work, your thinking becoming part of how they tell their story. Anyone who takes this job becomes the permission slip they're seeking.

I'm not available. When my wife and I were running Outdoorithm Collective on credit card float, I built Kindora because we needed it. Somewhere in that process, I stopped waiting for institutions to do better.

But here's the question I'm not asking OpenAI, and probably should be: Are you willing to forgo the activities that require redemptive philanthropy? Not "how generously will you give back?" but "what will you refuse to build because it can't be made right through subsequent charity?"

Until we're asking that question, we're just negotiating the terms of extraction.

And here's the question I cannot ask, because my professional identity depends on not asking it: Should the role of "thoughtful philanthropy leader" exist at all?

Justin Steele is co-founder and CEO of Kindora, a Public Benefit Corporation using AI to help social-sector organizations find and win funding. He previously directed nearly $700 million in philanthropy at Google.org over a decade and serves as a trustee at The San Francisco Foundation. This piece was originally published on LinkedIn.