Sam Altman Announces OpenAI's Best 12 Months Begin Now, Consistent With Prior Six Announcements

SAN FRANCISCO—In what his office characterized as a routine communication, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman announced Thursday that the company is "about to have" its best 12 months to date — a statement that company records indicate has been issued, in substantively identical form, at the conclusion of each of the six previous 12-month periods, three of which were at the time also described as OpenAI's best.

The announcement, made via X post, followed an admission that the prior year had not been the company's strongest, a shortcoming Altman attributed to himself. The post took 17 minutes to compose and approximately 4 seconds to publish, according to a person familiar with the drafting. It received 48,000 likes.

The past twelve months saw user complaints about GPT-5.6 producing outputs described as "too cautious," "too agreeable," and, in several widely-shared forum posts, "somehow both." The company's desktop application spent five weeks in post-update degradation. The public benefit corporation conversion, described in November 2024 as "moving quickly," remained pending.

"The team is doing amazing work," Altman wrote. "I think you'll be very happy with what they've got cooking for you."

A subsequent post described OpenAI's pipeline as containing "several things we can't talk about yet" that Altman called "genuinely exciting." This characterization, the communications office confirmed, has appeared in company statements dated 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and twice in the first half of 2025.

"The key metric to focus on," Altman added, "is the next 12 months."

"This time, we really mean it," a spokesperson said.