OpenAI Employee Headcount Surges to Over 7,000 in Early 2026
OpenAI employed 7,216 people as of February 7, 2026, according to business intelligence platform Tracxn and various other trusted sources.
The San Francisco company, founded in 2015, expanded its workforce to 3,531 employees in September 2024, according to figures compiled by SQ Magazine.
That growth followed a jump from 770 staff members in November 2023.
OpenAI headcount increase coincided with revenue gains at the artificial intelligence developer.
Annual revenue run rate climbed to more than $20 billion in 2025 from $2 billion in 2023, as outlined in a January 19, 2026, blog post by Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar.
"Our revenue grew 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025," Friar wrote.
Compute capacity at OpenAI rose to about 1.9 gigawatts in 2025 from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023.
According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI counted roughly 4,000 employees at the end of 2025, with average stock-based compensation of $1.5 million per worker.
On February 5, 2026, OpenAI introduced Frontier, a platform for enterprises to build and manage AI agents.
The firm acquired healthcare technology startup Torch for about $60 million in January 2026, as noted in company records compiled on Wikipedia.
OpenAI faced senior staff departures in early 2026, including Vice President of Research Jerry Tworek, amid a shift in resources toward its ChatGPT product, per a February 6, 2026, article in The American Bazaar.
"Our compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025," Friar wrote in the same post.
The company projected expenditures of $17 billion in 2026, escalating to $35 billion in 2027.
