Late last month, Musk sought a federal court to prevent OpenAI from transforming into a for-profit organization. OpenAI posted screenshots of text messages in a blog post on Friday, proving that Musk and the OpenAI team agreed seven years ago that it should turn into a for-profit organization, saying that Musk not only wanted but actually created a for-profit organization, "When he didn't get a majority stake and full control (of OpenAI), he left and told us we would fail."

OpenAI and one of the founding fathers, Musk, completely broke up and publicly dumped evidence. Musk, who recently sought a U.S. court to prevent OpenAI from transforming into a for-profit organization, indicates that the court battle between the two parties may escalate.

On Friday, December 13th, Eastern Time, OpenAI published a blog post with a title directly directed at Musk: "Musk wants a for-profit OpenAI." The article lists a detailed timeline of interactions between the team and Musk since the founding of OpenAI, and screenshots provide evidence of relevant email exchanges and text messages, proving that as early as 2017, Musk had reached an agreement with OpenAI's team leaders to support OpenAI's transformation from a non-profit organization to a for-profit organization.


According to the above-mentioned blog post of OpenAI, in November 2015, before OpenAI was officially announced, Musk questioned the structure of OpenAI when it was founded as a non-profit organization.

Musk said in an email on November 20, 2015: "Also, the structure did not seem to be the best choice... It would be better to have a standard C corporation and a parallel nonprofit organization." OpenAI's team felt at the time that a nonprofit was the right path, but later realized that the organizational structure must continue to evolve to attract the capital needed to complete the mission.

More than a year later, in 2017, the OpenAI team discovered that based on the existing research AI progress at that time, billions of dollars needed to be invested in hardware expenditures to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). In the summer of this year, the OpenAI team and Musk reached a consensus that in order to advance the mission of AGI, OpenAI needs to become a for-profit organization in the next step.

The blog post wrote:

“On July 13, 2017, [OpenAI President] Greg Brockman asked Shivon Zilis, who served as the liaison between Elon (Musk) and OpenAI, to review the notes from that day’s meeting with Elon, where we proposed a deal with a hardware startup. When it came to the idea of a startup merger, Greg said “it ended up being a matter of structure (he said a nonprofit was definitely the right choice early on, but maybe not the right choice now—Ilya [OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever] and I agree on that for a number of reasons).”

The blog post also attached the following screenshot of text message communication after the above paragraph.


According to the blog post, in September 2017, Musk founded a public benefit company called "Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.". Also in that month, OpenAI rejected Musk's conditions because the team believed that letting him unilaterally control OpenAI and its technology violated AGI's mission. The team told Musk: "OpenAI's goal is to make the future better and avoid AGI dictatorship."

The OpenAI blog post concluded that Musk "not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit organization like the new structure OpenAI had proposed. When he didn't get majority ownership and full control [of OpenAI], he left and told us we would fail. Now, OpenAI is the leading AI research lab, and Elon (Musk) runs a competing AI company, and he is asking the court to prevent us from effectively pursuing our mission."

OpenAI posted a blog post more than two weeks ago. Marc Toberoff, a lawyer representing Musk and his AI startup xAI, had just submitted a preliminary injunction to the U.S. Federal Court, applying to prohibit OpenAI from transforming into a full-scale for-profit enterprise and prevent OpenAI from requiring investors to avoid funding competitors such as xAI.

Toberoff said that the terms OpenAI requires investors to agree to constitute a "group boycott" that prevents xAI from obtaining critical investment capital. He also said that OpenAI and its largest "funder" Microsoft "are now trying to consolidate their dominant position by cutting off competitors' access to investment capital."

Wall Street News mentioned at the time that analysts believed that the latest court application documents marked an escalation of the legal dispute between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Musk sued OpenAI in state court in San Francisco in March, then withdrew the lawsuit and refiled it in federal court a few months later. At the time, Toberoff said in the indictment that OpenAI violated federal racketeering laws. In the middle of last month, Musk expanded the scope of his complaint, accusing Microsoft and OpenAI of violating antitrust laws. OpenAI banned its investors from investing in competing companies such as xAI.