OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit, has halted its drift toward full for-profit-dom—for now.

The company recently announced that its nonprofit board would remain in control as it restructures its for-profit arm to a public benefit corporation, like Anthropic and xAI, which will allow it to issue stock.

OpenAI had previously announced its aim to convert to a public benefit corporation in a way that would have untethered it from the nonprofit board’s oversight. The about-face came amid pressure from an ex-employee campaign, a lawsuit from Elon Musk, and “constructive dialogue” with the offices of the California and Delaware attorneys general, as OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor put it.

Rose Chan Loui, a nonprofit law expert at UCLA who has followed this case closely, said the sudden reversal was unexpected despite the growing public concern about the move.

“Honestly, I was surprised,” Chan Loui, founding executive director of the Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits, told Tech Brew. “I’m glad they’re listening, and I’m hoping that it also indicates that the current nonprofit board is truly trying to figure out how to fulfill their purpose and at the same time how to get what they need in terms of the marketplace.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The federal funding tap has been turned off.

That’s the reality cities, states, and the clean-energy sector are facing just months into the new Trump administration.

It’s electric, a Brooklyn-based curbside EV charging startup, is trying to make the best of the situation by helping its clients—like the cities of Boston, San Francisco, and Detroit—figure out effective ways to pursue their electrification goals without federal support.

“We’re really excited to be bringing this technology to all of these different cities, who are facing not only the same problem they faced before, which is how to scale EV infrastructure in a way that’s actually affordable,” Tiya Gordon, it’s electric’s co-founder and COO, told Tech Brew, “but the larger issue…is that most cities now are having to proceed with their electrification plans without any federal subsidies.”

“Their grants have been frozen or removed or put on a very high shelf, with a lack of clarity around when it can get pulled down from that shelf in the future,” she added. “So we’re working shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of our city and state partners to try and find solutions for electrification, with these new challenges around us.”

Gordon will join Tech Brew on Thursday, May 29, for a panel discussion on priorities in EV infrastructure during our live event, “Power Shift: Navigating the Intersection of Energy and Transportation.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Extreme weather events pose severe risks to the grid, including but not limited to power outages. Rhizome, a startup that uses AI to enable utilities to better prepare their equipment for future weather events, is encouraging customers to be proactive—rather than reactive—when it comes to climate-proofing their assets.

To further that goal, the company announced today it has secured $6.5 million in seed funding.

Rhizome’s products—gridADAPT, gridFIRM, and gridCAVA—use data on customer equipment and maintenance and historical weather data to help predict how well different equipment investments and maintenance will perform over time. The company’s products also vary in their offerings and price points: While gridADAPT (which helps prioritize resilience investing) and gridFIRM (to mitigate wildfire risk) pull from multiple data sources and can provide to-the-kilometer predictions, gridCAVA uses solely geographic information system, or GIS, data to help smaller utilities perform long-term planning.

“[We] collect as much data as possible on the utility system as well as the geographic environment,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani told Tech Brew. “We help measure, what is that resilience benefit? Or what is the risk-reducing effect of a given investment?”

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

AI all around: Google’s I/O was this week and, as anticipated, the tech giant rolled out a whole bunch of AI updates. The Verge rounded up all the biggest announcements from the conference.

Buy now, pay later maybe never: Klarna, a Swedish fintech company that allows users to buy products and then pay in installments, reported a “rise in unpaid balances” this week, Morning Brew noted. Klarna’s Q1 consumer credit losses spiked 17% YoY.