Elon Musk is reportedly willing to withdraw his offer to buy OpenAI on the condition that the company maintains its nonprofit mission as he co-founded it.
"If the OpenAI board is willing to maintain its nonprofit mission and agree to remove the 'for sale' designation from its operating model by stopping the transition, Musk will withdraw his offer," according to a new filing by Elon Musk's attorneys in a federal court in California on February 12, obtained by the WSJ.
Musk and OpenAI have not yet commented.
On the same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also filed a lawsuit in federal court in California asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to review Musk's $97.5 million acquisition bid two days earlier. Altman argued that Musk is "self-contradicting" by fighting OpenAI's efforts to become profitable and asked the judge to stop the process.
Responding to Business Insider, Marc Toberoff, Musk's attorney, called Altman's letter "completely irrelevant" and said it "distracts from the issues at hand."
Musk, Altman, and others founded OpenAI in December 2015. When it was founded, the company was a non-profit, dedicated to the benefit of artificial intelligence for humanity, and claimed that its research had "no financial obligations."
About four years later, OpenAI began creating a for-profit subsidiary that would operate alongside the nonprofit OpenAI Nonprofit, with the goal of raising capital and increasing investment while maintaining its original mission. OpenAI Nonprofit remains the parent company.
But in December of last year, OpenAI announced plans to turn the for-profit subsidiary into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation in an effort to raise more capital. After the reorganization, the nonprofit portion of OpenAI will own a stake in the for-profit company.
Meanwhile, Musk has become increasingly aggressive in preventing OpenAI from becoming a fully for-profit company, which he says is contrary to its original purpose. Last year, he sued the company he co-founded, alleging that Altman misled him into founding OpenAI. On February 10, the billionaire submitted a bid for all of the nonprofit's assets to OpenAI's board - an idea that was considered "a dramatic escalation in Silicon Valley's most intense AI competition".
In response to this move, Altman said that Musk was trying to disrupt and slow down OpenAI. "I have nothing to say. I mean, it's ridiculous," Reuters quoted Altman as saying on the sidelines of the AI Summit in Paris on February 11. "The company is not for sale. This is another one of his tactics to try to disrupt us".
The OpenAI CEO also commented to Bloomberg: "He's probably been in a position of insecurity his whole life. I don't think he's a happy person. I really feel sorry for him".