CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic that are PBCs may be focusing on working for benefit of humanity as they say

CEOs of top US AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that are PBCs may be focusing on working for benefit of humanity as they say. USA PBCs seem to allow such humanitarian mission orientation.

When updating my recent India AI Impact Summit post on 21 Feb 2026 with update covering Brazil and India co-operating on AI for Global South, I was unaware that some leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic operate under Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) structures — a relatively recent legal innovation (2010) in the US. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation, "A company chooses to become a benefit corporation in order to operate as a traditional for-profit business while simultaneously addressing social, economic, and/or environmental needs."

The CEOs of these PBC AI companies could very well be focused on working for benefit of all humanity. I cannot say that they have to focus on shareholder profit. Whether PBC governance meaningfully enforces public-benefit missions over time remains an open question, but their stated intent cannot be dismissed on structural grounds.

So I have corrected my previous post to reflect the above.

OpenAI states in "Evolving OpenAI’s structure", https://openai.com/index/evolving-our-structure/ dated May 2025: "We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from civic leaders and engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California. We thank both offices and we look forward to continuing these important conversations to make sure OpenAI can continue to effectively pursue its mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity."

Note that ChatGPT is a product of OpenAI.

P.S. Two days back I saw a May 2023 video where Elon Musk who is a co-founder of OpenAI and who subsequently left OpenAI, says, "What is the opposite of Google? It would be an open-source nonprofit because Google is closed-source and for-profit....". I wondered more about how OpenAI CEO could say that they are working for benefit of humanity.

Today I came to know about OpenAI following some hybrid model having both nonprofit and for-profit objectives, after watching the initial part of this video (perhaps first 3 minutes): Sam Altman on His Feud With Elon Musk Dec. 2024, ~11 mins. But watching only this initial part of the video, left me confused. I switched to a chat with ChatGPT where I shared the content of my above-mentioned post and had a discussion on the accuracy of a paragraph where I had stated, "The driving force for AI company bosses has to be - making money for stockholders."

Later I switched back to above video and saw the whole of it. That led me to look up PBC related info. and see the OpenAI "Evolving OpenAI’s structure" article. That gave me a better picture. I also discussed it with ChatGPT to confirm my understanding. If you want to look up the chat, I have shared it publicly.