Sam Altman did not just offer startups cheap compute. He appears to have proposed a way for OpenAI to finance demand for its own products while picking up equity in the companies using them.

OpenAI is reportedly offering startups in the current Y Combinator batch $2 million in OpenAI tokens in exchange for equity through a SAFE. Founders get relief from one of the most painful costs in AI. OpenAI gets a claim on the company. The interesting part is not the generosity. It is the loop.

If the structure works, OpenAI is no longer just selling infrastructure to ambitious young companies. It is helping fund their adoption of that infrastructure, reducing the apparent cost of choosing its stack, and keeping a financial interest in what happens next. The startup becomes a customer and a portfolio company at the same time. That is a more powerful position than either one alone.

The point is strategic

The charitable reading is easy enough. OpenAI wants to help young founders build more ambitious products. That may be true. It is also beside the point.

Large platform companies do not hand out $2 million equivalents because they are feeling warm. They do it because they think subsidized adoption is cheaper and more effective than waiting for the market to sort itself out. In OpenAI's case, the structure is especially efficient because the subsidy is not cash. API credits are expensive for the recipient and cheaper for the issuer. Founders feel the grant as operating capital because it cuts a live expense. OpenAI feels it as demand creation on top of infrastructure it already owns, prices, and optimizes.

The SAFE is what turns a credit program into a strategy. OpenAI is not merely lowering the cost of adoption. It is taking equity exposure to the companies whose behavior it is helping shape. If a startup becomes a heavy customer, OpenAI wins. If it becomes a valuable company, OpenAI may win again. If both happen, the economics start to stack.

The customer and the portfolio company are the same company

That overlap is the center of gravity here.

Traditional cloud incentives were built around one outcome: get the startup onto your stack early, hope migration costs keep it there, and win the infrastructure revenue if the company scales. Venture investing sat somewhere else, with a different vehicle, a different team, and a different time horizon. OpenAI's reported YC structure compresses those functions into one instrument.

A startup that takes the offer is no longer just buying inference. It is entering a relationship in which OpenAI may participate on both sides of the ledger. If the company becomes a breakout application, OpenAI may capture value in several ways:

direct API revenue as the company scales
strategic value from having a category-defining app built on its models
equity upside through the SAFE if the startup becomes valuable

That changes the economics of customer acquisition. OpenAI is not paying purely for usage growth. It may also be paying for ownership, preference, and future optionality inside the most important startup cohort in software.

If the startup fails, OpenAI loses subsidized compute and a small paper claim. If it wins, the upside compounds. That makes this something more consequential than a conventional credits program. It moves OpenAI from vendor toward financier at the exact moment the next generation of AI applications is taking shape.

YC is not just a batch. It is a filter

The logic gets stronger once Y Combinator enters the picture.

There are plenty of places to scatter credits. There is only one YC, still the most concentrated funnel of technically credible, speed-obsessed early-stage founders in the market. Even critics who think the accelerator is less singular than it once was would concede the basic point: a current YC batch remains one of the densest collections of startup ambition anywhere in software. In 2026, that matters even more because so many of those startups are AI-native by default.

For OpenAI, backing the batch is a way of outsourcing selection to an institution that already does the filtering. YC finds the companies, socializes the deal, and wraps it in founder legitimacy. OpenAI supplies the model credits and picks up exposure to a broad basket of startups that are unusually likely to build products where model access is not incidental but central.

This gives OpenAI several immediate advantages:

it reaches a concentrated pool of ambitious founders all at once
it benefits from YC's brand as a trust layer
it gets portfolio exposure to a broad slice of AI-native startup formation without choosing every winner one by one

The more important effect is behavioral. If a generation of YC founders starts with subsidized OpenAI usage, the default architecture of the batch may begin to tilt before a clean market choice is ever made. That does not guarantee permanent lock-in. It does shape the first draft of the market.

Cheaper than cash, stickier than marketing

The economics are what make the structure elegant.

If OpenAI invested $2 million in cash into every YC company, observers would call it a venture program. If it simply gave away usage credits, they would call it developer relations. The reported structure sits between those categories and borrows the strengths of both.

Credits are more efficient than cash because they direct spending back into OpenAI's own ecosystem. A founder cannot use them to hire a sales team, cover rent, or buy compute from a rival. The subsidy comes with a lane marker built in. It shapes experimentation, product design, and operating habits around OpenAI's stack.

It is also stickier than marketing. Ads create awareness. Free credits can create technical dependence. Once a startup has built its workflows, prompts, evaluation pipelines, latency assumptions, and user experience around a particular model family, switching providers becomes costly even when the functionality starts to look comparable.

That has a second-order consequence. Subsidies do not just lower cost. They can distort choice. If OpenAI reduces the effective price of adopting its stack, then startup formation data becomes harder to read cleanly. Are founders choosing the best model, or the one that came bundled with financing, validation, and an easier first year? For OpenAI, that ambiguity is useful. For rivals, it is a harder market to penetrate.

What OpenAI is really buying

The obvious answer is equity. The more interesting answer is position.

By financing usage in exchange for a future claim on the company, OpenAI is buying early architectural loyalty from startups that may become meaningful AI businesses in their own right. It is also buying visibility into where ambitious founders are pushing the frontier of application design. Even without board control or concentrated ownership, proximity has value. OpenAI gets to see which use cases consume the most inference, which products scale, which workloads harden into enterprise systems, and which teams matter.

The program gives OpenAI several things at once:

investment exposure to the application layer
earlier lock-in around its API and model family
market intelligence on where AI-native demand is forming
a hedge against application companies capturing most of the value above the model layer
signaling power with later-stage investors, recruits, and customers who may read OpenAI involvement as validation

That last point matters. The economics of the deal may be modest on a company-by-company basis. The signaling effect may not be. If traditional investors start reading OpenAI's presence as a mark of technical seriousness, the company gains influence that extends beyond its ownership percentage.

This is also a response to a structural problem facing every frontier model provider: the most valuable companies on top of the model layer often end up with more durable economics than the provider itself. Application companies can own the workflow, the user relationship, and eventually the margin. By taking equity earlier, OpenAI gives itself a chance to participate financially in that upside rather than merely powering it from below.

The biggest names already inside the OpenAI orbit

This is not OpenAI's first attempt to build a startup empire around its core technology. Through the OpenAI Startup Fund and related vehicles, the company has already accumulated exposure to a number of high-profile AI startups.

Among the most notable names:

Figure AI / 1X / robotics-adjacent bets: OpenAI has shown a clear interest in embodied AI, including investments linked to humanoid robotics and physical-world automation. These are long-duration bets on AI escaping the screen.
Harvey: The legal AI company became one of the clearest examples of what an OpenAI-powered application can look like when it moves from novelty to enterprise workflow. Harvey's reported valuation reached about $3 billion in 2024 and later climbed materially higher in subsequent reporting, making it one of the most visible application-layer winners tied to the OpenAI ecosystem.
Ambience Healthcare: A healthcare documentation and clinical workflow bet. It reflects OpenAI's interest in sectors where language models can become deeply embedded in high-value, domain-specific work rather than casual consumer interaction.
Physical Intelligence: A robotics and foundation-model company that reportedly reached a valuation above $2 billion. The significance is less the headline number than the pattern. OpenAI is not just investing in wrappers. It is placing chips across the broader AI stack.
Speak: One of the clearest consumer-facing success stories in the portfolio, using generative AI for language learning at scale.
Descript: A media and editing company that fits the thesis that creative software becomes more valuable when AI capabilities are native rather than bolted on.
Anysphere, Cognition, and adjacent coding-tool winners: Even where OpenAI is not the only capital source, coding and developer tools remain a natural zone for overlap between model usage and equity upside.

The broader point is straightforward. OpenAI's portfolio already contains companies large enough to prove the model can work. The YC deal looks less like a one-off stunt and more like a scaled version of an existing strategy.

Why Altman would like this structure personally

Altman occupies an unusual position here because he understands both sides of the table. He ran Y Combinator. He now runs one of the foundational infrastructure companies of the AI era. He knows what founders want to hear, but more importantly, he knows what they actually need in the earliest stage: speed, credibility, and relief from a punishing cost curve.

A $2 million token allocation hits all three.

It lets a founder tell investors that a major cost center has been partially neutralized. It lets them tell recruits and customers that OpenAI has real skin in the game. And it gives them permission to build aggressively rather than ration every API call from day one. For Altman, the move is strategically hard to resist because it uses OpenAI's strongest assets, distribution and compute, to solve founders' most immediate pain while pulling them closer into OpenAI's orbit.

It also sends a message to rivals. Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and others can compete on model performance and pricing. What is harder to replicate is the cultural positioning of being the default partner to the most ambitious startup cohort in the market.

The risks are real

None of this means the strategy is guaranteed to work cleanly.

The main risks are easy to see:

dependence: founders may worry about becoming too tightly tied to a single model provider
pricing pressure: if inference becomes radically cheaper, the lock-in value of credits falls
regulatory scrutiny: deals that blur the line between infrastructure provider and investor may attract more attention over time
benchmark contamination: if adoption is subsidized, market share becomes harder to interpret as a clean signal of product preference
overfitting: some strong startups will prefer independence, multi-provider flexibility, or lower-cost alternatives

There is also a simpler objection. Maybe the dollar amount is too small to matter. Maybe ambitious companies will still multi-home. Maybe this is just normal platform seeding behavior in a more aggressive wrapper.

That is possible. But even if the economics are modest, the default-setting effect can still matter. Early architecture decisions have long half-lives. So do early signals about who the favored builders are.

OpenAI's $2 Million Bet on Y Combinator