OpenAI confirms Elon Musk’s approval for ChatGPT maker to transition to for-profit status

OpenAI responded to Elon Musk’s allegations that the creator of ChatGPT had strayed from its original mission of serving humanity and prioritized financial gain instead, promising to have his legal action dismissed.

The first comments on OpenAI since Tesla’s CEO sued last week have escalated tensions between the San Francisco-based AI company and the billionaire who led its founding years ago.

“OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and useful AGI and creating widely distributed benefits,” OpenAI said in a blog post late Thursday from five company executives, including CEO Sam Altman. “We intend to reject all of Elon’s claims.”

AGI refers to general artificial intelligence, which are general-purpose artificial intelligence systems that can perform as well as—or even better than—humans in a wide variety of tasks.

According to Musk’s lawsuit, when he funded OpenAI at its start-up, he got an agreement that the company would remain a non-profit in developing the technology for the benefit of the public.

His suit alleges breach of contract and seeks an injunction preventing anyone — including Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI — from benefiting financially from its technology.

OpenAI said both the startup and Musk understood the company needed to become a for-profit entity, and released screenshots of emails between the Tesla CEO and OpenAI executives discussing the possibility but not agreeing on terms.

“Change your name,” Musk responded Wednesday on X, the social media platform he owns, formerly known as Twitter.

He also posted a laughing emoji in response to a user who tweeted that OpenAI should be renamed OpenEmail.

Musk was an early investor in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015 and co-chaired its board with Altman. He said in the lawsuit that he invested “tens of millions” of dollars in OpenAI.

However, the company said that while Musk invested less than $45 million, it has raised more than $90 million from other donors.

OpenAI said that by 2017, company leaders began to realize that building general AI would require massive amounts of computing power.

“We all realized that we needed a lot more capital to succeed in our mission — billions of dollars a year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we could raise as a nonprofit,” it said.