OpenAI fires back at Elon Musk in legal fight over breach of contract claims | OpenAI

OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk’s lawsuit accusing it of betraying its altruistic roots, claiming the Tesla chief executive had in fact supported the artificial intelligence company’s plans to create a for-profit unit.

Executives at the ChatGPT maker released a blogpost containing what it claimed was historical email correspondence with Musk in which the entrepreneur suggested merging the San Francisco-based startup with Tesla and said it should attach to the electric carmaker “as its cash cow”.

The blog, authored by OpenAI executives including its chief executive, Sam Altman, claims that in 2017 “we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity”.

Last week Musk filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI, where he was a founding board member, of deviating from its foundational mission by forming a for-profit unit – and putting making money before its core aim of producing technology for the benefit of humanity.

“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired – someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” said OpenAI.

The company said it intended to seek a court dismissal of Musk’s claims of breach of contract, which have been lodged in a San Francisco court.

OpenAI said the suggestion for a Tesla merger came after Musk and the company decided the next step was to create a for-profit entity in 2017 to generate capital for building artificial general intelligence, or AGI. The term refers to a theoretical form of AI that can achieve a range of tasks at a level of competence at or above human levels of intelligence.

Musk, who this week was overtaken as the world’s richest man by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, then wanted a majority of the equity, initial board control and to be chief executive of OpenAI, the company said.

But OpenAI and Musk could not agree to terms on a for-profit because the startup felt that it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over the firm.

In his lawsuit, Musk said he and OpenAI’s co-founders, Altman and Greg Brockman, had originally agreed to work on AGI in a way that would “benefit humanity”.

Musk also said he pushed OpenAI to announce an initial $1bn funding commitment in 2015, after Altman and Brockman initially planned to raise $100m.

Musk’s lawsuit is a culmination of his long-simmering opposition to the startup. OpenAI has since become the face of generative AI, partly due to billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft. Musk went on to found his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, launched in July.