As Americans race to meet Tuesday’s deadline for filing their tax returns, OpenAI and H&R Block are letting tax professionals know that, by next year, their jobs may be a little easier.
The companies said on Tuesday that they’re working together to develop a new generative artificial intelligence tool tool that they hope will be finished in time for the 2026 tax season.
The goal is to help H&R Block’s tax pros stay up to date on tax code changes and to more quickly answer “the most gnarly questions that walk through the door,” said Andy Phillips, vice president of The Tax Institute at H&R Block, the company’s central hub for tax expertise.
H&R Block files more than 20 million tax returns per year, at over 9,000 U.S. offices with more than 60,000 tax professionals, the company says. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and its other generative AI products, as well as competitive offerings from Google, Anthropic and others, have been rapidly making their way across the economy into consumer and business applications.
Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, said tax returns present a clear opportunity for generative AI, but not in a way that replaces the human element. The new product with H&R Block will be powered by vetted data from The Tax Institute.
“AI is great when there’s structured data, like you have in a tax situation, but it’s nuanced — it needs to be personalized,” Chatterji said in an interview. “It’s at its best when it’s kind of a forced multiplier for human expertise.”
The partnership is taking shape during a period of dramatic changes to the tax code, and historic downsizing at the Internal Revenue Service.
The Trump administration has proposed eliminating income tax for Americans making less than $150,000 a year, and wants to get rid of taxes on tips and Social Security benefits.
Meanwhile, thousands of employees at the IRS have lost their jobs in recent months, with reports indicating that the agency may cut as much as half of its roughly 90,000-person staff. It’s one of the big targets for Elon Musk in his effort leading President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash government costs and substantially reduce the size of the federal workforce.
A January hiring freeze led the IRS to rescind job offers, and the agency reportedly doesn’t have time to look at certain cases due to being understaffed. Last week, top officials at the IRS, including its acting head, reportedly quit after the agency agreed to hand over migrants’ data to federal agents.
OpenAI and H&R Block said their partnership isn’t connected to President Trump’s tax code changes, and Chatterji said the project began “several months ago.”
The project’s initial phase should launch later this year, followed by a large-scale deployment ahead of the 2026 tax season, the companies said. They didn’t provide financial terms of the agreement. H&R Block told CNBC that it doesn’t plan to raise prices for consumer tax returns.
OpenAI and H&R Block will also collaborate to study the “return on investment from AI tools” in the tax space, Chatterji said. They will get to see “from a qualitative standpoint, how is AI being used by the pros, which situations are the most common, which kind of resources are the most useful,” he said.
Last month OpenAI closed a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation, making it the second most-valuable private U.S. tech company, behind SpaceX, according to CB Insights.
While much of the value of OpenAI is built on the sophistication of its large language models, the company told CNBC that, when it comes to taxes, it takes the same approach as with other consumer information and “does not train on any customer data, full-stop.”
