OpenAI launches $50 million People-First AI Fund
The OpenAI Foundation's unrestricted grants targeted US nonprofits with operating budgets between $500,000 and $10 million; applications opened that month and closed in October.
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OpenAI’s nonprofit launched the People-First AI Fund, a $50 million programme of unrestricted grants for US 501(c)(3) organisations with annual operating budgets between $500,000 and $10 million. The fund targeted nonprofits using AI to expand access to services, build organisational resilience, or advance work in education, economic opportunity, healthcare and community-led research, with the application window running through early October.
Because the grants were unrestricted rather than tied to specific projects, OpenAI framed the fund as trusting grantee organisations’ own expertise about where the money would do the most good, rather than directing it toward OpenAI-chosen priorities. Nearly 3,000 organisations applied, and the Foundation announced its first wave of awards — $40.5 million across 208 nonprofits — that December.
The fund was a comparatively small commitment against OpenAI’s other 2025 spending commentary, but it marked one of the nonprofit parent’s first concrete grant-making programmes following the company’s restructuring announcement earlier the same week, ahead of the far larger $25 billion commitment the OpenAI Foundation made when the restructuring was completed the following month.