GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
OpenAI has purchased TBPN, the viral online talk show that often interviews AI executives and other tech leaders. The show — which goes live every weekday, often for a three-hour duration — considers channels like Bloomberg and CNBC as its competition and counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as executives from Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz, among its past guests.
TBPN host John Coogan wrote on X that the show will be “staying the same.” He added, “This is a full circle moment for me as I’ve worked with [Altman] for well over a decade. He funded my first company in 2013 … We’re excited to have more resources than ever going forward.”
TBPN’s views averages about 70,000 viewers per episode, and it generated more than $5 million in advertising revenue this year, with projections to draw in more than $30 million in 2026 revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI’s reasoning for purchasing the show involved “accelerating the global conversation around AI,” according to a company blog post, which includes a memo sent Thursday by Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment. Simo wrote, “As I’ve been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us … With the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.”
The TBPN team will help with OpenAI’s corporate comms and marketing, but Simo wrote that it will still retain “editorial independence” with regards to running programming and choosing guests. The team will operate under OpenAI’s Strategy organization and report to its VP of global policy, Chris Lehane.
The purchase comes at a time when OpenAI’s public image has seen better days. Although the company recently closed a $122 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, it’s still reeling from internal and external controversy after Altman signed a deal with the Department of Defense while Anthropic’s own public battle with the Pentagon was taking place. OpenAI is also under more pressure than ever to generate revenue ahead of its reported plans to go public this year, and it recently announced it would shut down the Sora app in order to devote compute and other resources to enterprise and coding tools.
This story is breaking. Please check back for updates.