When word started circling that AMC Theaters was screening an AI-generated short film, the internet’s cinephiles took it personally.
On Wednesday, some social media users reported that the short was playing in the pre-show before trailers at select AMC locations. A little digging revealed the source: Earlier this week, the short, titled Thanksgiving Day, was announced as the winner of the inaugural Frame Forward Animated AI Film Festival. The prize package included a nationwide theatrical release, which apparently entailed making its way to AMCs screens.
Movie lovers across social media were immediately up in arms. Some called for boycotts. Some found it insulting that if pre-show screen time were being given to short films, AMC would feature AI-generated content rather than human-made movies. Almost all seemed to agree that the move was, as one disgruntled user put it, “hot garbage.”
Don't go to AMC theatres.Boycott all slop. https://t.co/x4HrMttzGB— Ewan Morrison (@MrEwanMorrison) February 18, 2026
Imagine if they were screening traditionally made short films … https://t.co/cvCTtKlYMF— Scott Jeschke (@ScottJeschke) February 18, 2026
hey @AMCTheatres this is hot garbage https://t.co/aL1b05Xw46— Miss Gender (@girldrawsghosts) February 18, 2026
Less than 24 hours later, AMC issued a statement to set things straight. Showing Thanksgiving Day wasnt AMCs idea, but an initiative from Screenvision Media, a cinema advertising company that co-organized the Frame Forward festival. According to AMC, Screenvisions pre-show advertising packages run in fewer than 30 percent of AMCs U.S. locations.
AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate, the statement, which was given to the Hollywood Reporter, concluded.
Social media users celebrated the news that AMC would no longer screen the short. Yes, its a victory in itself for anti-AI advocates. But perhaps more importantly, it suggests that brands take notice when consumers speak out against AI integration.
According to film critic Jacob Harper, claims about AIs inevitably dont hold water. Stand firm against AI in film! Make them listen and they WILL listen! Never underestimate the power of your voice! Harper wrote in his post on X. Very proud of AMC for this!
AI is inevitable. Adapt or be left behindNOPE. Stand firm against AI in film! Make them listen and they WILL listen! Never underestimate the power of your voice!Very proud of AMC for this! https://t.co/N8ExrXiKij— Jacob Harper (@JacobAtTheMovie) February 19, 2026
Good Keep being loud about how much you dislike AI. It works! https://t.co/7oLsZqwOjZ— Is this a 3D model? (@IsThisA3DModel) February 19, 2026
A wonderful example ofYou slop, you flop. https://t.co/WScuO9FEY6— Ewan Morrison (@MrEwanMorrison) February 20, 2026
KEEP COMPLAINING ABOUT AI!!! https://t.co/xBodh0vSEc— Drew (@HeyImReallyDrew) February 19, 2026
AMC wasnt the only theater showing the short, and its not the only theater to axe it. Social media users also reported seeing Thanksgiving Day ahead of films at Hollywoods iconic TCL Chinese Theatre, prompting similar outrage from moviegoers.
PUT SOME LOONEY TUNES ON INSTEAD OR SOMETHING WTF https://t.co/qfsjuEqsN8— Zac (@ZacStrikesAgain) February 18, 2026
But a representative for the theater tells Fast Company that the short has been removed, following AMCs example.
Though Thanksgiving Day may no longer be part of the AMC experience, organizers of the Frame First festival, including AI film company Modern Uprising Studios, arent giving up on the short.
In a statement issued by the festival, president and studio head of MUS Joel Roodman said that the theatrical run was only the beginning of plans for the AI-generated film, which include adapting Thanksgiving Day for a new immersive theatrical venue coming to New York City.
Shared theatrical experiences are an important cultural bond,” Roodman said. “The traditional theatrical chains are vital to our cohesion as a society, and are duly cautious [about AI]. However, the media landscape is changing and evolving rapidly.”
“They may be prudent, but it is important to MUS immersive that new and exciting films, filmmakers, cinematic language, and spaces for these shared experiences continue to develop,” Roodman added. “We will bring new content, and important existing content, to our developing venue network of venues, starting in New York. We will not see the theatrical window wither on our watch.
At one point in my life, I managed a team of seven. My days consisted of 1:1 calls, performance reviews, and running interference between the team, other departments, and customers.
I thought thats what I wanted: the perceived power and responsibility of being a manager. But in reality, it was very stressful.
Today, I have been a solopreneur for three years. The assumption is that solo businesses are a starting point. You launch alone, build momentum, hire employees, and scale. That’s the entrepreneurs playbook, right?
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But over 80% of small businesses in the U.S. have no employees, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. For many of us, that’s not a limitation. Staying solo is a deliberate strategy that prioritizes control and flexibility over growth for growths sake.
Small is a strategy, not a stepping stone
The “grow or die” mentality makes sense for companies that have dreams of becoming large, enterprise organizations. And some small businesses may have that dream.
The cultural assumption is that a solo business is Phase One: something to outgrow. But many solopreneurs are choosing to stay small permanently.
Hiring employees fundamentally changes what you do every day. You stop being a practitioner and become a manager. Some people want that transition. Many don’tand recognizing that isn’t a failure of ambition. It’s simply prioritizing a different way of working.
Revenue isn’t profit
A report by Gusto found that 77% of solopreneurs are profitable in their first year, compared to just 54% of businesses with employees. And 93% of solopreneurs expect to be profitable in 2025, versus 80% of employer businesses.
A company earning a million dollars per year sounds impressive until you subtract salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and the overhead required to keep it all running. The owner of that business may take home less than a solopreneur earning a third of that revenue with almost no overhead.
When you stay solo, you can increase your effective rate by being selective. You might take on fewer, better-paying clients instead of chasing volume. In the end, revenue is a vanity metric if you’re working more hours for less take-home pay.
You don’t need permission to reinvent yourself
Staying solo means retaining total control over your business and your life. When you have employees, every pivot requires buy-in, transition planning, and often difficult conversations. You can’t just decide to raise your rates, shift your niche, or take a three-month sabbatical.
In the several years Ive worked for myself, Ive gone through several iterations of Who am I? What do I do? What clients should I serve?
I can change my entire service offering without consulting anyone. I can walk away from a client who isn’t working out without worrying about how it affects someone else’s paycheck. That flexibility is especially valuable in an uncertain economy because I can respond to market changes in days, not months.
The question solopreneurs should ask themselves isnt necessarily, “How can I grow and scale?” It’s “What kind of business do I actually want to run?”
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The venerable business case study method got its start in 1921 at the Harvard Business School. The method became standard at the school throughout the 1920s and since then Harvard has a near-monopoly grip on the business, selling its cases to over 4,000 rival schools.
Cases can be useful and informative, but recognize that they arent reality. The companies featured typically require that the case writer submit the case to them for approval. That introduces survivor biaswhoever is still around at the time of publication gets to dictate how the narrative is told. Another issue is that the companies selected and held up as exemplars are subject to the halo effect. This is the tendency to believe that because a company was successful, copying its practices will create success elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the iron law of transient advantage is hard to escape. The 1995 Dell case doesnt hold up so well. A 2002 case about Nokia centered on how the successful phone company was going to deal with the 8 billion in cash piling up in its accounts. And dont even get me started on the 618 (!) cases that feature the General Electric Corporation.
Which brings me to the decades of adulation long accorded to Southwest Airlines.
The Shortest Distance to Just Another Airline
Southwest Airlines ran a Super Bowl ad this year. In it, passengers scramble through a jungle, climbing over each other in a chaotic race to grab seats. The tagline? “That was wild. Assigned seating is here.” The ad was intended (I think) to indulge in gentle mockery of the past. I found it jarring. Herb Kelleher, the airlines colorful co-founder, would have been horrified, I think. I last met with him (over a Wild Turkey bourbon, of course) at the Strategic Management Society Meetings in 2004 and he was adamantemployees first, deep attention to details, and most importantly, fun!
The many (348!) cases, book chapters, and textbook references to Southwest reference its tightly integrated strategy where every element reinforced every other, allowing it to be profitable in a notoriously tough business.
A Boeing 737-2H4 in Southwest livery, ca. 1977. [Photo: Museum of Flight/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images]
Kellehers insight was that there was a particular kind of flyer whose other option was driving, so short flights that replaced a 4-5 hour drive were attractive. That meant you didnt have to offer meals. One aircraft type (Boeing 737s) meant simplified maintenance, training, and scheduling. Open seating enabled 20-minute turnarounds instead of competitors’ 35 minutes. That extra utilization squeezed more flights from every plane. Bags fly free meant fewer delays at check-in and faster boarding. Employees came first and everybody pitched in. Pilots helped clean cabins, gate agents jumped in wherever needed.
And even with all that, the companys culture of having fun at work made the operational discipline feel human rather than mechanical. One of my favorite examples is a flight attendant rapping the entire safety briefing to the tune of Ice, Ice, Baby. Or this one, safety with a sprinkling of humor.
The takeaway
The big teaching point from the Southwest cases is that competitive advantage isn’t about any single policy. It’s about the fit between policies. Remove one piece and the whole system weakens. Southwest has now removed all of them.
Assigned seating went into effect January 27th. “Bags fly free” ended in May 2025. The company is adding premium extra-legroom sections and tiered fare bundles. They’ve announced redeye flights and partnerships with Icelandair. They’ve conducted the first layoffs in their 53-year history. At least they are honesttheir COO explained the bag fee reversal with refreshing candor: “We need more revenue to cover our costs.”
Activist investors at Elliott Management got what they wanted. But what exactly has Southwest become? As one former loyalist put it: “There’s simply no reason to fly Southwest anymore.
Southwest’s leadership cited research showing “8 out of 10 customers prefer assigned seating.” They also acknowledged that after fare and schedule, bags fly free was cited as the #1 reason customers choose Southwest. The problem is that when you remove that differentiator, you’re now competing on fare and schedule against Delta, United, and American, carriers with better route networks, international reach, premium cabins, and decades more experience operating their models. Like all the other airlines, we are likely to now see pitched battles for overhead space, another blow to a business model built on fast airport turnarounds.
The Super Bowl ad could be a case study in strategic confusion. Southwest is making fun of customers who were passionately loyal to what made Southwest diffeent, while asking those same customers to believe the company’s “legendary hospitality” somehow exists independent of the operational system that enabled it.
Take lessons from case studies with caution
There’s a deeper lesson here. Case studies are snapshots. They capture what worked at a particular moment, under particular boundary conditions. What they dont speak to is what to do when those conditions shift.
Southwest’s open seating made sense for the short-hop flights taken by their initial core customers. When the alternative was expensive legacy carriers, those customers would have been driving were it not for Southwest. By 2024, travelers had options that didn’t exist in 1971 or 1991 or even 2011. JetBlue offered assigned seats with personality. Spirit and Frontier offered unbundled ultra-low fares. Delta went upmarket with better service. The white space Southwest once occupied got crowded.
My friends Zeynep Ton and Frances Frei exchanged concerns for the culture of the airline. Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School, captured this concern: “I sure hope this isn’t a case of activist investors coming in and insisting on a set of decisions that they won’t be around to have to endure. Great organizations get built over time. It doesn’t take very long to ruin an organization.”
I’m not arguing Southwest should have frozen in amber forever. Markets change. Customer preferences evolve. Even the most elegant strategy eventually needs updating. But there’s a difference between thoughtful evolution and abandoning your model.
Herb Kelleher once said humility and discipline go together: “You can’t really be disciplined in what you do unless you are humble and open-minded.” He built an airline that knew exactly what it was, knew exactly who it served, and had the discipline to say no to opportunities that didn’t fit.
Southwest’s new leadership knows what investors want. Whether they know what Southwest is anymorethat’s less clear.
Is it lawful to call boneless chicken wings ‘wings’? According to a U.S. District Judge, yes.
On Tuesday in Illinois, Judge John Tharp reached a verdict in a case brought against Buffalo Wild Wings alleging that the wings aren’t wings and shouldn’t be referred to as such on the restaurant chain’s menu. The suit, which was first brought by customer Aimen Halim in March 2023, claimed the business had violated the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act by referring to the product as “boneless wings” instead of something the plaintiff deemed more fitting, such as “chicken nuggets.
In the end, the judge didn’t feel the case had any bones. In a 10-page ruling, Tharp wrote, Boneless wings are not a niche product for which a consumer would need to do extensive research to figure out the truth. Instead, ‘boneless wings’ is a common term that has existed for over two decades.”
Tharp continued, asserting that the plaintiff didn’t have enough solid evidence to prove Buffalo Wild Wings was at fault. Halim did not ‘drum’ up enough factual allegations to state a claim. Though he has standing to bring the claim because he plausibly alleged economic injury, he does not plausibly allege that reasonable consumers are fooled by Buffalo Wild Wings’ use of the term ‘boneless wings.'”
The judge also cited a 2024 Supreme Court case, which also involved boneless wings at a different establishment in Ohio. In that case, the plaintiff was allegedly injured by a bone from a so-called “boneless wing” getting lodged in his throat. However, the court ruled that under Ohio law, a reasonable consumer could have reasonably anticipated and guarded against the bone at issue”, regardless of it being called “boneless.”
Judge Tharp wrote, “As the Ohio Supreme Court recently put it, ‘[a] diner reading boneless wings on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating chicken fingers would know that he had not been served fingers.”
Now, Buffalo Wild Wings is celebrating the case’s dismissal. In a social media post, the chain wrote, “Theyre called boneless wings and will forever be called boneless wings. Celebrate the courts decision today with BOGO FREE boneless wings.” According to the chain’s website, the BOGO deal happens every Thursday.
Regardless of the fact that the lawsuit has been tossed, the conversation about whether boneless wings are wings is still popping off. Commenters on Buffalo Wild Wing’s celebratory post ranged from pure disgust with the verdict to fierce defense of both the chain and of boneless wings.
“This makes me never want to go to BWW,” one user wrote. “They arent ‘Buffalo wings’, theyre just wings AND your ‘boneless wings’ are chicken tenders. Cmon man.” Others called the wings “grown up chicken nuggets” or simply vented that the chain’s wings are subpar in general.
On the contrary, some commenters expressed their enthusiasm for the menu item. “Boneless wings are the only wings that should be consumed,” wrote another X user on the post.
While the judge made his ruling, he also said that the plaintiff can amend his initial complaint by March 20. Halim will have the opportunity to “provide additional facts about his experience that would demonstrate that BWW is committing a deceptive act.”
Walgreens will lay off hundreds of employees as the pharmacy chain continues to struggle with increased competition and higher-than-desired costs. On top of this, the newly private company is expected to close at least another few dozen retail stores in 2026. Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
Walgreens has announced that it will cut at least 628 jobs across two states, according to communications it sent to the states in question earlier this month. A Walgreens spokesperson confirmed the layoffs with Fast Company when reached for comment.
News of the layoffs was first reported by Bloomberg.
The job cuts include 469 positions in the companys home state of Illinois and 159 jobs in Texas, where the company is shuttering a distribution center.
Were focused on becoming Americas best retail pharmacy, beginning with improving the instore experience for our customers and patients,” Walgreens said in a statement to Fast Company. “To do this, weve made the difficult decision to simplify our organization in both the support center and with our field leadership to speed decision making and improve the service that millions of customers rely on every day.”
“We have deep respect for our colleagues and greatly appreciate their contributions and are committed to supporting them throughout this transition,” the spokesperson added.
Walgreens has been closing stores
In addition to the layoffs, Walgreens also reportedly confirmed that it will be closing dozens of stores in 2026.
While no exact numbers were given, Bloomberg says the pharmacy chain confirmed that the number of closing locations would be fewer than 100, which is less than previously planned. Walgreens said in 2024 that it had targeted 1,200 stores for closure by 2027.
Walgreens will also reportedly open four new locations this year.
Pharmacy chains have struggled in recent years
Last August, Walgreens went private when the private equity firm Sycamore Partners purchased the company for roughly $10 billion. The move marked the end of the iconic pharmacy chains nearly century-long reign as a publicly traded company.
For years before the deal, Walgreens, like other pharmacy chains, had struggled with increased online competition from the likes of Amazon and falling foot traffic that was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Pharmacy chains have also struggled with rising costs and increasing debts. These factors contributed to competitor Rite Aids bankruptcy in 2025 and led to a wave of pharmacy layoffs over the past few years, including at CVS.
According to the company’s website, Walgreens currently has around 8,000 locations in the United States and Puerto Rico and employs around 211,000 workers.
The worst days of the pandemic are long behind us, but the world is still reeling from its aftereffects. For some people, this has driven a dramatic reprioritizing of whats important in their lives, including where they work and the kind of energy theyre prepared to give to the company that employs them.
According to a new survey, one result of the pandemic aftershocks in the workforce is a sharp rise in how much people want to take time off to travel. Younger Americans are so keen to vacation, in fact, that theyre putting off big life decisions and even going into debt. Not only could this shift in priorities affect your business if youre trying to attract young customers, but it may change how you think about your own staffs working hours.
The data comes from a new survey of a thousand Americans by financial services company Empower, Fortune reports. Headline numbers from the report are that over 90 percent of people are planning domestic travel this year. Plus 33 percent have said theyre not going to wait until retirement to see the worldtheyre doing it now, instead. And when it comes to money, 47 percent of people said they would spend more on travel this year than last. Even more strikingly, one in five Millennial workers are postponing plans for big purchases, like a home, and will spend the money on travel instead.
While the vast majority of workers, 61 percent, said they plan to travel in the summer, 34 percent said they will travel in out-of-season time, and 24 percent said theyd travel for birthdaysthese last are both types of trip that are likely to impact their regular work schedule, since they dont revolve around typical vacation times. In particular, Gen-Z staff, at 28 percent, said they were more likely than older generations to travel for their birthdays, and a quarter of Gen-Z staff liked to plan their trips four weeks or less ahead of timemeaning theyre more likely to spontaneously ask for time off than older employees.
Fortune quotes Christie Hudson, head of public relations at online travel firm Expedia, who says that a significant share of respondents to a similar, recent Expedia survey plan to travel no matter what this year. In terms of attitude and valuing experiences over things, that whole mentality, people seem very aligned in the post-pandemic era, she said.
This news is playing out as many people continue to feel considerable economic stress thanks to inflation, and amid an epidemic of quiet vacationingremote workers just continuing to work as if theyre at home, but taking a trip without telling their employer, simply because they dont want to seem like theyre slacking, or cant afford to take time off.
More vacation time and more flexible vacation policy may be anathema to many more traditional U.S. employersthe kind rattling their sabers with strict back-to-office rules because they think staff labor is proved by their grinding away for long hours right where they can see them. But Empowers data shows more employeesof all agesare planning vacations. Younger workers (who already dislike the grind of the traditional workplace) arent shy about showing they want to travel more spontaneously and even postpone big life plans to do so. To attract and retain them, it might be worth reevaluating your companys PTO policy.
An Ernst & Young study shows why this could be a good idea: For each extra 10 hours of vacation time an employee took, their year-end performance jumped 8 percent. Another survey showed that if a staff member takes all their vacation time, theyre actually boosting their chances of getting a raise or promotion. Plus if you want to attract new younger workers, advertising your more generous vacation policyincluding, perhaps, relaxed summer work hoursmay actually help you recruit or retain Gen-Z staff.
Something to think about as you relax and watch the fireworks this upcoming long weekend.
Kit Eaton
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister site, Inc.com.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
OpenAI, the maker of the most popular AI chatbot, used to say it aimed to build artificial intelligence that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return, mission statement. But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same emphasis on doing so safely.
While reviewing its latest IRS disclosure form, which was released in November 2025 and covers 2024, I noticed OpenAI had removed safely from its mission statement, among other changes. That change in wording coincided with its transformation from a nonprofit organization into a business increasingly focused on profits.
OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits related to its products safety, making this change newsworthy. Many of the plaintiffs suing the AI company allege psychological manipulation, wrongful death, and assisted suicide, while others have filed negligence claims.
As a scholar of nonprofit accountability and the governance of social enterprises, I see the deletion of the word safely from its mission statement as a significant shift that has largely gone unreported outside highly specialized outlets.
And I believe OpenAIs makeover is a test case for how we, as a society, oversee the work of organizations that have the potential to both provide enormous benefits and do catastrophic harm.
Tracing OpenAIs origins
OpenAI, which also makes the Sora video artificial intelligence app, was founded as a nonprofit scientific research lab in 2015. Its original purpose was to benefit society by making its findings public and royalty-free rather than to make money.
To raise the money that developing its AI models would require, OpenAI, under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. Microsoft initially invested US$1 billion in this venture; by 2024 that sum had topped $13 billion.
In exchange, Microsoft was promised a portion of future profits, capped at 100 times its initial investment. But the software giant didnt get a seat on OpenAIs nonprofit board meaning it lacked the power to help steer the AI venture it was funding.
A subsequent round of funding in late 2024, which raised $6.6 billion from multiple investors, came with a catch: that the funding would become debt unless OpenAI converted to a more traditional for-profit business in which investors could own shares, without any caps on profits, and possibly occupy board seats.
Establishing a new structure
In October 2025, OpenAI reached an agreement with the attorneys general of California and Delaware to become a more traditional for-profit company.
Under the new arrangement, OpenAI was split into two entities: a nonprofit foundation and a for-profit business.
The restructured nonprofit, the OpenAI Foundation, owns about one-fourth of the stock in a new for-profit public benefit corporation, the OpenAI Group. Both are headquartered in California but incorporated in Delaware.
A public benefit corporation is a business that must consider interests beyond shareholders, such as those of society and the environment, and it must issue an annual benefit report to its shareholders and the public. However, it is up to the board to decide how to weigh those interests and what to report in terms of the benefits and harms caused by the company.
The new structure is described in a signed in October 2025 by OpenAI and the California attorney general, and endorsed by the Delaware attorney general.
Many business media outlets heralded the move, predicting that it would usher in more investment. Two months later, SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, finalized a $41 billion investment in OpenAI.
Changing its mission statement
Most charities must file forms annually with the Internal Revenue Service with details about their missions, activities and financial status to show that they qualify for tax-exempt status. Because the IRS makes the forms public, they have become a way for nonprofits to signal their missions to the world.
In its forms for 2022, OpenAI said its mission was to build general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) that safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
OpenAIs mission statement as of 2023 included the word safely. IRS via Candid
That mission statement has changed, as the company filed with the IRS in late 2025. It became to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
OpenAIs mission statement as of 2024 no longer included the word safely. IRS via Candid
OpenAI had dropped its commitment to safety from its mission statement along with a commitment to being unconstrained by a need to make money for investors. According to Platformer, a tech media outlet, it has also disbanded its mission alignment team.
In my view, these changes explicitly signal that OpenAI is making its profits a higher priority than the safety of its products.
To be sure, OpenAI continues to mention safety when it discusses its mission. We view this mission as the most important challenge of our time, it states on its website. It requires simultaneously advancing AIs capability, safety, and positive impact in the world.
Revising its legal governance structure
Nonprofit boards are responsible for key decisions and upholding their organizations mission.
Unlike private companies, board members of tax-exempt charitable nonprofits cannot personally enrich themselves by taking a share of earnings. In cases where a nonprofit owns a for-profit business, as OpenAI did with its previous structure, investors can take a cut of profits but they typically do not get a seat on the board or have an opportunity to elect board members, because that would be seen as a conflict of interest.
The OpenAI Foundation now has a 26% stake in OpenAI Group. In effect, that means that the nonprofit board has given up nearly three-quarters of its control over the company. Software giant Microsoft owns a slightly larger stake 27% of OpenAIs stock due to its $13.8 billion investment in the AI company to date. OpenAIs employees and its other investors own the rest of the shares.
Seeking more investment
The main goal of OpenAIs restructuring, which it called a recapitalization, was to attract more private investment in the race for AI dominance.
It has already succeeded on that front.
As of early February 2026, the company was in talks with SoftBank for an additional $30 billion and stands to get up to a total of $60 billion from Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft combined.
OpenAI is now valued at over $500 billion, up from $300 billion in March 2025. The new structure also paves the way for an eventual initial public offering, which, if it happens, would not only help the company raise more capital through stock markets but would also increase the pressure to make money for its shareholders.
OpenAI says the foundations endowment is worth about $130 billion.
Those numbers are only estimates because OpenAI is a privately held company without publicly traded shares. That means these figures are based on market value estimates rather than any objective evidence, such as market capitalization.
When he announced the new structure, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, We secured concessions that ensure charitable assets are used for their intended purpose. He also predicted that safety will be prioritized and said the top priority is, and always will be, protecting our kids.
Steps that might help keep people safe
At the same time, several conditions in the OpenAI restructuring memo are designed to promote safety, including:
A safety and security committee on the OpenAI Foundation board has the authority to that could potentially include the halting of a release of new OpenAI products based on assessments of their risks.
The for-profit OpenAI Group has its own board, which must consider only OpenAIs mission rather than financial issues regarding safety and security issues.
The OpenAI Foundations nonprofit board gets to appoint all members of the OpenAI Groups for-profit board.
But given that neither the mission of the foundation nor of the OpenAI group explicitly alludes to safety, it will be hard to hold their boards accountable for it.
Furthermore, since all but one board member currently serve on both boards, it is hard to see how they might oversee themselves. And doesnt indicate whether he was aware of the removal of any reference to safety from the mission statement.
Identifying other paths OpenAI could have taken
There are alternative models that I believe would serve the public interest better than this one.
When Health Net, a California nonprofit health maintenance organization, converted to a for-profit insurance company in 1992, regulators required that 80% of its equity be transferred to another nonprofit health foundation. Unlike with OpenAI, the foundation had majority control after the transformation.
A coalition of California nonprofits has argued that the attorney general should require OpenAI to transfer all of its assets to an independent nonprofit.
Another example is The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Pennsylvania newspaper became a for-profit public benefit corporation in 2016. It belongs to the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit.
This structure allows Philadelphias biggest newspaper to attract investment without compromising its purpose journalism erving the needs of its local communities. Its become a model for potentially transforming the local news industry.
At this point, I believe that the public bears the burden of two governance failures. One is that OpenAIs board has apparently abandoned its mission of safety. And the other is that the attorneys general of California and Delaware have let that happen.
Alnoor Ebrahim is a professor of international business at The Fletcher School & Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Those in steady employment in 2026 might feel like they won the lottery, as the number of job openings dwindles at the same time as layoffs continue to hit.
This has caused some recruiters to shift their focus from employers to the unemployed: Instead of companies hiring recruiters to find and place talent, job seekers are now the ones enlisting recruiter services to help get a foot in the door, coughing up hefty fees (either a flat rate or a cut of the candidates first-year salary once they land a job).
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the trend which has come to be known as reverse recruitment.
One boutique agency the Journal spoke with, The Reverse Recruiting Agency, charges $1,500 per month, plus 10% of first-year salary upon job acceptance, at which time they will refund the first months fee. Their services include customized résumés (with zero AI-written slop), hiring manager outreach, LinkedIn profile and résumé optimization, and networking support. Their promise? Nine interviews in the first three months, or your money back.
Refer is another reverse recruitment agency that connects talent directly with hiring managers using an AI agent, Lia. Lia is currently making 20-plus introductions daily between candidates and hiring managers who have already expressed interest in their profiles. The cost of landing a job with Refer will set new hires back 20% of their first months paycheck.
As sites like LinkedIn are flooded with applications and employers rely on AI résumé screeners, applicants are increasingly seeking alternative ways to get their profiles in front of the right people.
Theres also those offering these services for less on gig platforms, like Fiverr. But for those with the means, or those desperate enough, spending a few thousand dollars to not have to suffer the indignities of the job hunt may seem like a fair deal. Looking for a job is a time-consuming and often ego-bruising taskespecially considering one in four unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, are still job hunting six months later.
A low-hire, low-fire environment means that, while the current unemployment rate isnt all that bad, for those out of work it’s incredibly difficult to land a job. Roughly one million more people are seeking work than there were available jobs as of December, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by Indeed.
Many job seekers employing the services of reverse recruiters may have been unemployed for monthsat which point theyve exhausted their 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, which replace less than 40% of a persons previous income on average.
Here, pay-to-play hiring is a worrying trend and a sign of a bleak job market. When job seekers are made to shoulder the financial burden of their own recruitment, without guaranteed results, it shifts the risk from employers to the unemployed, many of whom will already be under immense strain and stress.
Lets call this what it is: predatory marketing wrapped in career coaching language, a résumé writer and former recruiter, Sarah Johnston, posted on LinkedIn.
This is a dark space, don’t do it, founding partner of executive search firm Cowen Partners, Shawn Cole also posted. ”Reverse-recruiter models” are not real or reputable recruiting firms. They are résumé spammers.
He added: Your résumé and livelihood shouldnt be treated like spam.
It’s hard to tell AI news from AI hype at the best of times, but the most recent surge around agents, triggered by many developers embracing Claude Code a couple of months ago, feels like something different. With the viral freakout over Moltbook, the agent social network, and the Super Bowl ad slap fight between OpenAI and Anthropic, AI has escalated to a new level of mainstream attention.
Everyone’s forgotten about the AI bubble and is instead dancing around the AI “inflection point,” when AI in general and agents in particular begin to take over huge swaths of knowledge work, with massive consequences for the economy and the workforce. The recent sell-off of SaaS stocks is an indication of how seriously the industry takes this.
For journalists, all this mainstream AI noise, coupled with the steady drumbeat of layoffs in the media industry, quickly turns into a familiar feeling: pressure to do more. As newsrooms shrink and AI tools get framed as productivity machines, its easy to assume the right response is higher output. But AI isnt just changing how stories get made. Its changing how stories get found. So the temptation to use AI to do “more with less,” which in many cases will be to tell the same kinds of stories, just more quickly and more often, is misguided.
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This is because of the contradiction in how AI systems surface information: While they look for sameness to reinforce the patterns they’re seeing, they don’t reward it. That’s the difference between being cited in an AI summary vs. being in the background. AI only needs one competent version of the commodity story; it goes looking for the one that looks authoritative and adds something new.
More isnt more
In practice, yes, you could use AI to accelerate news production, letting you cover more stories than you could before, and a few newsrooms are doing that. And on an individual level, that might even signal your value to your employer in the short term. But if it’s effectively the same story reported elsewhere, an AI engine has no reason to prioritize yours over another.
Instead, the more logical path is to invest in the parts of journalism that only humans can do: finding new and novel information through sourcing, research, interviews, and analysis. In other words, while the instinct to do more isn’t wrong, it should be aimed at going deeper, not wider.
AI can still be an accelerant here, speeding up ideation, research, and even things like reaching out to sources. A digital media researcher, Nick Hagar, recently showed what this looks like in practice, using coding agents to recreate a deep analysis from a human-authored journalistic investigation on Virginia police decertifications. The interesting thing about his case study is that, when used with very specific tools (such as Claude Code “skills,” which essentially turn certain research tasks into templates), he could quickly replicate the work, but ultimately his human judgment was required throughout. “Even with skills enforcing a structured workflow, I made dozens of judgment calls…. Skills make the workflow more systematic; they dont eliminate the need for human attention,” he wrote.
That points to the better way journalists should think about AI: The goal isn’t to create more stories, but to create stories that are so valuable and definitive that AI search engines can’t ignore them.
Authority over output
To succeed in this new environment, the No. 1 habit that journalists will need to break is the natural instinct to cover more. Very few reporters think they’ve got a full grip on all the stories on their beat, and as newsrooms shrink, they have less help than ever. It doesn’t mean you ignore all breaking news, but it does mean a mental shift from reaction to discernment. In many cases, that might mean narrowing a beat to a micro-beat (say, from “energy” to “nuclear power”).
A lot of what I’m describing is happening naturally as many reporters, either victims of layoffs or entrepreneurially minded, flock to platforms like Substack and Beehiiv to put out a shingle. It’s not just the best-worst optionthe system is pushing incentives in this direction, rewarding people who build authority via content that goes deep in a specific subject area and brings original insights and information to the table.
Certainly, you don’t have to strike out on your own to take this approach, though it does require discipline to put aside story FOMO and focus on where you can bring something original to the table. And the rewards go beyond simply having a better chance at surfacing in AI answers: you’ll have a stronger connection to your audience because they’ll be coming to you for information you can’t get anywhere else. The value of shaping narratives instead of chasing them is much greater than any short-term traffic spike.
That’s a hopeful idea, and paired with the changing incentives of the media ecosystem, it points to a key insight. AI’s ability to summarize and transform content has caused many to wonder what the “atomc unit” of journalism is. Some think it’s the unique facts, quotes, or insights that are woven into stories, but I think all this implies it’s something more abstract: editorial judgment. As AI systems absorb more of the mechanical labor of journalism, theyre inadvertently clarifying the thing they cant absorb: human judgment about what matters and why. If this is an inflection point, it isnt in the tools. Its in the work we choose to do.
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The Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trumps far-reaching global tariffs, handing him a significant loss on an issue crucial to his economic agenda.
The decision on Friday centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the sweeping reciprocal tariffs he levied on nearly every other country.
Its the first major piece of Trumps broad agenda to come squarely before the nations highest court, which he helped shape with the appointments of three conservative jurists in his first term.
The Republican president has been vocal about the case, calling it one of the most important in U.S. history and saying a ruling against him would be an economic body blow to the country.
But legal opposition crossed the political spectrum, including libertarian and pro-business groups that are typically aligned with the GOP. Polling has found tariffs arent broadly popular with the public, amid wider voter concern about affordability.
