Sam Altman told the current Y Combinator class that OpenAI will invest $2 million in tokens in every startup in the cohort. The startups give up equity in return. Y Combinator partner Tyler Bosmeny called it a “mic drop moment.” The deal works for OpenAI on two levels. The first is straightforward: equity in 169 early-stage companies. The second is lock-in. Startups that build on OpenAI’s tokens during their formative months are unlikely to migrate to Claude Code or Gemini after their workflows, fine-tunes, and customer integrations are already running on OpenAI infrastructure.