Earlier this month, Elon Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s efforts to transform itself from a nonprofit into a purely for-profit company.
On Friday, OpenAI responded with its own legal filing, arguing that Mr. Musk is merely trying to hamstring OpenAI as he builds a rival company called xAI.
What Mr. Musk is asking for would “debilitate OpenAI’s business, board deliberations, and mission to create safe and beneficial A.I. — all to the advantage of Musk and his own A.I. company,” the filing said. “The motion should be denied.”
OpenAI also disputed many of the claims made by Mr. Musk in the lawsuit he brought against OpenAI earlier this year.
In a blog post published before Friday’s filing, OpenAI portrayed Mr. Musk as a hypocrite, saying that he had tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the organization six years ago.
The filing and blog post included documents claiming to show that in 2017, Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office, registered a company called “Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc.” that was meant to be a for-profit incarnation of OpenAI.
“His own words and actions speak for themselves,” the company said. “Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Birchall did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk sued OpenAI in March in a state court in San Francisco, before withdrawing the suit without explanation. Seven weeks later, he filed a new suit in federal court.
Like the original suit, the federal complaint claimed that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Mr. Musk has since added new claims to the suit and filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI to prevent it from transforming itself into a for-profit.
After joining with Mr. Musk to create OpenAI in 2015 and pledging to carefully develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, the suit claimed, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman abandoned this mission by entering into its multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.
OpenAI is now trying to restructure itself so that the nonprofit no longer controls its operations. Mr. Musk’s suit aims to block the move.
OpenAI on Friday argued that Mr. Musk also pushed for a corporate structure and equity compensation that would personally enrich him. In text messages from September 2017 exchanged with Mr. Brockman, included in its blog post, Shivon Zilis, an early OpenAI board member and liaison to Mr. Musk, wrote that Mr. Musk expected to have 50 percent to 60 percent of the equity in the new company.
Ms. Zilis did not respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI also claimed in its blog post that during a call at the time, Mr. Musk told the company’s executives that he needed the stake in any for-profit entity to help him accumulate $80 billion so he could build a city on Mars.
Mr. Musk stepped away from OpenAI in early 2018, before the Microsoft partnership was created. In November, he amended his federal lawsuit to add Microsoft as a defendant and Ms. Zilis, who is now the mother of at least three children with Mr. Musk, as a plaintiff.
Earlier this month, at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Mr. Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about his feud with Mr. Musk. Now that Mr. Musk is set to lead an advisory group for the Trump administration, some people question whether Mr. Musk will use that influence against OpenAI. But Mr. Altman rejected the idea that his former collaborator would use his political power against him.
“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” Mr. Altman said.
On Friday, Mr. Altman said he would be donating $1 million to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inaugural fund.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of A.I., and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Mr. Altman said in a statement.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies deny the claims.)
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