Current and former OpenAI employees have grown increasingly frustrated with the company’s long-standing ban on donating equity to charity. That frustration appears to have forced some movement. According to a memo seen by The Verge, OpenAI’s equity team has told eligible employees they will soon be able to donate their shares — welcome news for those who have been waiting to give.
The amounts involved are not trivial. Employees who received six-figure equity packages back in 2019 could be looking at millions of dollars in potential charitable donations.
A source familiar with the situation told The Verge that the policy is arriving around 18 months later than employees had been led to expect. That delay stings, because charitable equity donations were originally held up by OpenAI as a genuine perk — a selling point in an AI hiring market that was already brutally competitive. For comparison, Anthropic runs a more generous programme: it matches equity donations dollar-for-dollar on up to 25% of an employee’s grant, as stated on the company’s careers page.
There is a catch, though. The deadline for employees to decide how much they want to donate is extremely tight — far shorter than the minimum 20 business days the SEC typically requires for other liquidation decisions. That compressed window could easily leave some employees without enough time to think things through. OpenAI’s own communication advises people to speak with tax or financial advisors, which is sensible advice, but harder to act on when there’s little notice and previous holds have already narrowed people’s options.
The decision to open a donation window at all comes after years of employee unease about the company’s control over their equity. As OpenAI’s valuation has climbed and its corporate structure has shifted, staff have repeatedly raised concerns about restrictive policies — including fears that vested equity could be clawed back if they violated non-disparagement agreements. Those worries have come up again and again in Slack threads and all-hands meetings, with the inability to donate to charities consistently near the top of the list.
Previous donation rounds happened in 2021 and 2022, and employees have been vocal about the gap since then. After a major tender offer to SoftBank that let employees sell roughly $1.5 billion in shares last year, many assumed a charitable donation opportunity would follow shortly. Instead, those plans were pushed back indefinitely. Now, with OpenAI’s recent mega-funding round closed and its controversial for-profit restructuring complete, the company appears to be loosening its grip.
OpenAI formally announced the resolution of its restructuring in late September, wrapping up negotiations with the attorneys general of California and Delaware that had dragged on for over a year. The company was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, and a central question going forward is whether its nonprofit arm will keep meaningful control over the technology it builds — including the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), systems whose capabilities match or surpass human cognition.
OpenAI’s share price has also moved quickly. Employees were recently able to sell equity at around $430 per unit. The fair market value now sits at approximately $483 per share, a rise tied in part to reduced financial obligations owed to the nonprofit entity. It is a significant jump in a short time, and it adds another layer of complexity for anyone trying to decide how much to donate and when.
