Altman offers YC startups $2M in tokens for 7% equity
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed giving each Y Combinator startup $2 million in API tokens in exchange for roughly 7 percent equity, aiming to lock early-stage companies into the OpenAI ecosystem.
Sam Altman offered every startup in the current Y Combinator batch $2 million worth of OpenAI API tokens in exchange for an equity stake of roughly 7 percent — what YC itself typically takes. The deal grants near-unlimited access to Codex and other OpenAI developer tools during the critical product-market-fit phase.
Altman framed the move as an experiment in "tokenmaxxing startups," curious to see what products emerge when compute costs drop to near zero for founding teams. The play is less about acquiring startup equity and more about enterprise lock-in. By subsidizing API usage at the earliest stage, OpenAI embeds itself in the technical stack before competitors like Anthropic can make a pitch. Startups that build on subsidized OpenAI tokens during product-market fit are unlikely to rewrite their inference layer later, even if Claude or another model pulls ahead on benchmarks. YC's Winter 2026 batch includes roughly 250 startups, putting the theoretical token outlay north of $500 million if every company accepted.