Altman: OpenAI will be a "perpetually low-profit" company, aiming to emulate Stripe.

At Stripe Sessions, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that OpenAI aspires to be a "perpetually low-margin, massive, and rapidly growing" infrastructure company, offering "smart meter"-like products that anyone can purchase to automate business, develop products, or embed into their own services. He compared OpenAI to Stripe, noting its pay-as-you-go model, where both Stripe and users benefit as the internet scales. Altman revealed that OpenAI has already signed 20-year electricity and land contracts to support this goal. He acknowledged the low switching costs of AI, citing the recent surge in users migrating from competing programming tools to Codex as evidence of how easily AI can be converted to a platform. He pointed out that while some companies might attempt to absorb the entire industry chain, OpenAI does not intend to do so, viewing models and data centers as a unified whole upon which other companies can build products. Altman also emphasized that businesses should not overestimate the impact of AI on existing business structures; while AI changes many existing processes, good products will still survive in the market. He also specifically mentioned that Shopify CEO Toby Lütke is the best AI adopter he has ever seen.