Screenshots released by OpenAI on Friday show that Elon Musk, one of the company's co-founders, pushed for the company to establish a for-profit structure as early as 2017. On Friday, OpenAI launched a counterattack against one of its co-founders, Elon Musk. Last month, the billionaire asked a federal court to prevent OpenAI from transforming into an entirely for-profit company.
In a blog post titled "Elon Musk Wants a For-Profit OpenAI," the startup claimed that in 2017, Musk "not only wanted, but actually created a for-profit" as part of the company's proposed new structure.
"When he didn't get majority ownership and full control, he left, telling us we would fail," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. "Now that OpenAI is a leading AI research lab and Elon runs a competing AI company, he's asking the court to prevent us from effectively fulfilling our mission."
Since Musk announced the debut of his OpenAI rival xAI in July 2023, the startup has released the Grok chatbot and raised $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation, in part to buy 100,000 Nvidia chips.
A member of OpenAI's legal team said Musk has questioned OpenAI's non-profit model from day one.
Musk wrote in a November 2015 email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that OpenAI's "architecture does not appear to be ideal," according to a screenshot shared in a blog post. He added that "receiving a salary from a nonprofit confuses the alignment of incentives" and that "it would be better to have a standard C corporation and a parallel nonprofit."
In a text message conversation with former board member Shivon Zillis, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman wrote that his conversation with Musk "turned into talking about structure" and that Musk "said the nonprofit was right in the early days but may not be right now," according to a screenshot of the blog.
According to the blog, Altman, Brockman, Musk and others were in talks in the fall of 2017 about the planned for-profit company OpenAI, but the talks broke down due to differences over ownership, control and who would serve as CEO. Musk initially proposed that he should "clearly have initial control" of the company, but said "that will change quickly" when the board has 12 to 16 members.
According to a screenshot from the OpenAI blog post, Musk created a public benefit company called Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc. in September 2017. Days later, OpenAI rejected Musk's for-profit terms and offered to continue talks, but Musk responded that his proposal was "no longer on the table" and "the discussion is over."
In January 2018, Musk proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla.
"The only path I can think of is a massive expansion of OpenAl and a massive expansion of Tesla AI, maybe both at the same time. The former would require a massive increase in endowments and highly credible people joining our board. The current board situation is very weak," Musk wrote. He added, "OpenAI is on a path to failure relative to Google."
Screenshots show Brockman laying out a lengthy plan that included the idea that the company should "do its best to remain non-profit." In February 2018, Musk resigned as co-chairman of OpenAI.