OpenAI replies to Musk suit with his words

Elon Musk supported making OpenAI a for-profit company, the ChatGPT maker said, attacking a lawsuit from the wealthy investor who has accused the artificial intelligence business of betraying its founding goal to benefit humanity as it pursued profits instead.

In its first response since the Tesla CEO sued last week, OpenAI vowed to get the claim thrown out and released emails from Musk, escalating the feud between the San Francisco-based company and the billionaire who bankrolled its creation years ago.

“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” OpenAI said in a blog post late Tuesday from five company executives and computer scientists, including CEO Sam Altman. “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”

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

The lawsuit from Musk, who now has his own AI startup, says that when he funded OpenAI as it was launching, he secured an agreement that the research lab would remain a nonprofit to develop technology for the public’s benefit.

OpenAI said both the startup and Musk recognized the need for the company to become a for-profit entity to gain enough resources to compete with companies like Google, posting screenshots of emails between the Tesla CEO and OpenAI leaders in which they discuss the possibility but can’t agree on terms.

“This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” Musk said in an email dated Dec. 26, 2018, about the level of funding OpenAI would need.

In response to the OpenAI blog post Wednesday, Musk took to his social media platform X.

“Change your name,” Musk posted. “To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit,” he said in a follow-up tweet hours later.