The maker of ChatGPT has accused Elon Musk of campaigning to destroy the company through “harassing legal claims and a sham bid”, as it launched a countersuit against the billionaire.
OpenAI has asked a federal judge to stop Musk from any “further unlawful and unfair action”, and hold him “responsible for the damage he has already caused”.
The South African-born American magnate co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015, along with nine other research engineers and scientists, as an artificial intelligence research lab. Musk left the company in 2018 and Altman later became chief executive.
Musk has criticised OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its original charitable mission by establishing a for-profit subsidiary to raise money from Microsoft and other investors. He has since launched a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, trying to block its conversion into a for-profit company and launched his own rival artificial intelligence service, xAI.
“Musk could not tolerate seeing such success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed,” OpenAI said in documents filed at a district court in California.
In February, Musk announced via X, the social media platform that he bought in 2022, that he would be launching a $97.4 billion bid for the non-profit entity that controls OpenAI.
Altman, OpenAI’s chief, quickly rejected the bid, saying on X: “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” in a reference to the apparent fall in the value of the social media platform that Musk bought for $44 billion.
Musk, a senior adviser to President Trump, said he would drop the offer, which OpenAI described as a “fake takeover bid designed to disrupt OpenAI’s future”, if the board of the artificial intelligence pioneer stopped its conversion into a for-profit company.
“Although OpenAI recognised the bid as a feint, its mere existence — and the media firestorm surrounding it — required OpenAI to expend significant resources in responding to it,” the ChatGPT maker said. Placing a $97.4 billion offer on the table was a “very public effort to artificially raise the floor for the non-profit’s valuation”, OpenAI said in court documents, which had “already caused confusion”, adding that “were it (or something like it) pursued further, the consequence could be a significant impairment of OpenAI’s ability to pursue its mission on terms uncorrupted by unlawful harassment and interference”.
A jury trial is due to begin in the spring of 2026.
Last month OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round at a valuation of $300 billion, led by SoftBank, the Japanese investment company. OpenAI has said it plans to use the money to “push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools”. It estimates that 500 million people use ChatGPT each week.
OpenAI has alleged that Musk poses a threat to its “economic relationships”, saying the enterprise and its people have “suffered harm as a result of Musk’s unlawful campaign of harassment, interference, and misinformation”.
The ChatGPT maker is on track to lose $5 billion this year and losses are expected to increase sharply to $14 billion a year by 2026, the company has said.
