Mattel Inc., the company behind global favorites like Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Uno, has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to create toys and games powered by artificial intelligence. The first AI-enabled product is expected to hit the market later this year, the company confirmed on Thursday.
“With OpenAI, Mattel has access to an advanced set of AI capabilities alongside new tools to enable productivity, creativity, and company-wide transformation at scale,” said OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap.
The initiative is part of Mattel’s broader vision to integrate AI into age-appropriate play, combining innovation, safety, and data privacy at its core.
The company said it plans to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety.”
By embedding OpenAI's advanced models, such as ChatGPT Enterprise, Mattel aims to enhance not just its consumer products but also internal creativity and productivity across departments. This marks the toymaker's first-ever AI product—a major milestone in its 79-year history.
This groundbreaking move comes at a time when toy manufacturers are grappling with weakened consumer demand, partly due to economic uncertainty triggered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policy shifts. In response, Mattel is tapping into new avenues to reignite growth.
To further diversify its business and cushion its core toy segment, Mattel has already turned to content-based strategies such as films, TV shows, and mobile games based on popular franchises like Barbie and Hot Wheels.
In addition to technological innovation, Mattel is making adjustments to manage ongoing cost pressures. Last month, the company withdrew its full-year forecast and announced plans to increase prices on select domestic products to balance rising supply chain costs.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company that has become one of the most prominent and influential organizations in the field of AI. Its mission, as stated in its charter, is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity."
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit organization by a group of prominent figures in the tech and AI world, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Musk.
The initial motivation was rooted in concerns about AI safety and the potential existential risks posed by advanced AI, with a desire to ensure that AI development would be open and benefit humanity as a whole, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few. They initially pledged $1 billion in capital, though the actual collected amount was significantly less in the early years.
For its first few years, OpenAI operated as a pure non-profit, focusing on fundamental AI research. Key early milestones included:
OpenAI Gym (2016): A toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.
OpenAI Five (2018): An AI system that competed and won against top professional players in the video game Dota 2, showcasing advanced multi-agent reinforcement learning.
A pivotal shift occurred in 2019 when OpenAI recognized that the enormous computational resources required to develop truly advanced AI systems (like AGI) would far exceed what traditional non-profit funding could support. To attract the necessary capital, they transitioned to a unique "capped-profit" model.
This hybrid structure established a for-profit subsidiary that could raise significant investments while still being controlled by the original non-profit, with profits capped and any residual value beyond the cap returning to the non-profit for the benefit of humanity. This move was immediately followed by a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, which also became OpenAI's preferred cloud provider (Azure).
The years that followed saw rapid advancements and the release of groundbreaking products that brought AI to the mainstream:
GPT-3 (2020): A highly advanced large language model (LLM) capable of generating human-like text, powering various applications.
DALL-E (2021): An AI system that generates images from text descriptions.
Codex (2021): An AI system that translates natural language into code, powering tools like GitHub Copilot.
ChatGPT (November 2022): The conversational AI chatbot that took the world by storm, rapidly reaching millions of users and sparking widespread public interest in generative AI.
GPT-4 (March 2023): An even more powerful and versatile successor to GPT-3, with enhanced reasoning, safety, and multimodal capabilities.
Sora (February 2024): A text-to-video model capable of generating realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.
GPT-4o (May 2024): A natively multimodal model that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time.
OpenAI offers a range of products and services, primarily accessed through its API platform, allowing developers and businesses to integrate its powerful AI models into their own applications:
ChatGPT:
Free Version: Widely accessible conversational AI chatbot.
ChatGPT Plus: A subscription service offering access to the latest models (like GPT-4o), faster response times, and priority access to new features.
ChatGPT Team & Enterprise: Business-focused solutions with enhanced security, administrative controls, and features like connectors to internal data sources (e.g., Google Drive, SharePoint).
API Platform: Provides developers access to OpenAI's core models:
GPT Series (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, o4-mini): For generating and understanding text, reasoning, vision capabilities, and more. These models are continuously updated.
DALL-E: For image generation from text prompts.
Whisper: For high-accuracy speech-to-text transcription.
Audio Models: For text-to-speech, generating synthetic voices, and other audio-related AI tasks.
Sora (currently in research/limited access): For video generation.
Tools & Agents: API endpoints and frameworks (like the Assistants API and Agents SDK) that allow developers to build AI agents capable of using tools (like web search, file search, code interpreter) and performing complex, multi-step tasks.
Research & Safety: OpenAI continues to conduct cutting-edge research in AI, focusing on areas like alignment, safety, and understanding AI capabilities. They regularly publish research papers and updates on their progress toward AGI.
OpenAI's unique corporate structure and aggressive fundraising have drawn significant attention:
Valuation: As of March 31, 2025, OpenAI's valuation reached an impressive $300 billion following its latest funding round. This makes it one of the most valuable private companies globally.
Funding: OpenAI has raised a total of approximately $57.9 billion across 11 funding rounds.
In March 2025, OpenAI closed a record-breaking $40 billion Series F funding round, led by SoftBank Group (with a $30 billion investment), and including significant contributions from Microsoft, Coatue, Thrive Capital, Altimeter Capital, and MGX. This was reportedly the largest private tech funding round in history.
Microsoft's total investment across multiple rounds is nearly $14 billion.
Revenue & Profit/Loss: OpenAI projected to generate $12.7 billion in revenue in 2025, a substantial increase from $3.7 billion in 2024. Despite this rapid revenue growth, the company has reported significant losses due to the massive investment required for compute infrastructure and research. OpenAI reportedly lost $5 billion in 2024 and is projected to lose $14 billion by 2026.
Corporate Structure: OpenAI operates under a complex "capped-profit" model:
OpenAI Nonprofit (the original entity): Governs and oversees all activities, with its board having a fiduciary duty to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. It fully controls the for-profit subsidiary.
OpenAI LP (the capped-profit subsidiary): This is the commercial arm that attracts investment and conducts the primary research and development. Its profits are capped, with any returns beyond the cap flowing back to the non-profit.
Recent discussions in April-May 2025 explored further restructuring, potentially converting the for-profit LLC into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) and adjusting the non-profit's control mechanism.
However, as of May 5, 2025, OpenAI announced it would abandon plans to remove the non-profit entity's controlling status, opting for the for-profit entity to still become a PBC but remain under the non-profit's control after discussions with regulators. This ensures the non-profit's mission remains paramount.
OpenAI's unwavering mission is to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that is safe and broadly beneficial to humanity. Their core principles, as outlined in their charter, emphasize:
Broadly Distributed Benefits: Ensuring AGI's deployment serves all of humanity and avoids concentrating power or causing harm.
Long-Term Safety: Committing to the research necessary to make AGI safe and promoting the adoption of such research across the AI community.
Technical Leadership: Remaining at the forefront of AI capabilities to effectively address AGI's societal impact.
Cooperative Orientation: Collaborating with other research and policy institutions to create a global community for AGI's challenges.
OpenAI's journey is a high-stakes endeavor to unlock unprecedented possibilities through AI, while grappling with the immense technical, ethical, and societal implications of building increasingly powerful intelligent systems.