Greg Brockman

Greg Brockman was raised in Thompson, North Dakota, and graduated from Red River High School in Grand Forks. While still in high school, Brockman took classes at the University of North Dakota beginning in sophomore year, studied and conducted research there, competed in math and chemistry competitions, and became a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search.13

Brockman went on to study mathematics at Harvard and computer science at MIT, having started out at Harvard before transferring.411

Brockman joined Stripe as an engineer in 2010 and became the company's founding engineer and chief technology officer, helping to build the payments company from its earliest days. Writing about the role in 2014, Brockman explained realizing that the most important thing to do as CTO was to empower Stripe's engineers to make big changes and improvements.1016

Brockman left Stripe to work on AI, drawn to the goal of moving humanity to safe human-level AI, a problem Brockman could imagine happily working on for the rest of a lifetime. Brockman helped start OpenAI, which was created in 2015, and Sam Altman has since described Brockman to the Senate as a co-founder.1178

As OpenAI's co-founder and chief technology officer, Brockman testified on November 30, 2016, at the Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence", which Brockman called an important first opportunity for senators to understand AI. Brockman described OpenAI's mission to build safe, advanced AI technology and ensure that its benefits are distributed to everyone, and urged the United States to compete on applications while cooperating on open, basic research.6

From OpenAI's first day, Brockman's software skills were always in demand. Brockman helped build OpenAI Gym, then was called to work on Universe, and later took on turning the game Dota into a reinforcement learning environment, breaking out of the game's Lua sandbox and incrementally exporting the whole game state so that machine learning work could begin.13

In June 2018, Brockman told the House Science, Space, and Technology subcommittees about OpenAI Five, a system that had reached the semi-professional level at Dota, a ten-player team strategy video game that is one of the most complex games played by humans.5

In 2019, Brockman wrote about completing a nine-month transition to becoming a machine learning practitioner, explaining that the biggest hurdle was getting comfortable being a beginner again. In 2020, Brockman worked on serving OpenAI's models to customers quickly, and later on making it possible for a small team to manage a massive system.1314

Brockman has long championed OpenAI's mission. In 2019, Brockman co-wrote a post explaining that OpenAI aims to capture the benefits of artificial general intelligence while mitigating its risks and to make sure those benefits accrue to all of humanity. OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and in September 2023 Brockman, by then co-founder and president of OpenAI, returned to the University of North Dakota to share that journey with the campus.12913

In "The Defender's Window" (August 2026), Brockman argued that AI will make it much easier for defenders to find, prioritize, and fix security flaws, and may shift the economics of cybersecurity in ways that fundamentally advantage defenders, offering practical steps for organizations to bring AI into their security work.15