OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in a memo on Tuesday that the company hasn’t received “anything official” from Elon Musk regarding a potential purchase of the artificial intelligence startup, CNBC reported.
“Our structure exists to ensure that no individual can take control of OpenAI,” Altman wrote, in the memo that was obtained by CNBC. “Elon runs a competitive AI company, and his actions are not about OpenAI’s mission or values. They are tactics aimed at weakening us because we’re making great progress.”
The note comes a day after news surfaced that Musk is leading a group of investors in trying to buy control of OpenAI for $98.4 billion. The offer is for the nonprofit that oversees the AI startup behind ChatGPT, and Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said he submitted on Monday,
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Toberoff told CNBC in a statement.
Altman and Musk are in the midst of a heated legal and public debate relations battle over the future of OpenAI. They were two of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2025, establishing the entity as a nonprofit focused on AI research. Musk is suing OpenAI, accusing it of antitrust violations and to try and keep it from converting into a for-profit corporation.
TechCrunch reported: In an interview at the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Elon Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit as “an attempt to slow OpenAI down.”
“Musk is obviously is a competitor,” Altman said. “He’s raised a lot of money for his AI company xAI, and they’re trying to compete with us from a technological perspective.”
Altman went on to quip, “I think Musk’s whole life is from a position of insecurity … I don’t think he’s a happy person.”
BBC reported: The chief executive of ChatGPT-owner OpenAI says it’s “not for sale” after a $97.4bn (£78.4bn) takeover bid from a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk.
Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI with Musk before a public falling out led to Musk’s departure, was speaking at the AI Action Summit in Paris.
“We are an unusual organization and we have this mission of making AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefit all of humanity and we are here to do that,” Altman said in an on-stage interview.
When asked to define AGI, Altman said “most people use it to mean, like, really strong, powerful AI systems.”
Unlike many tech giants, such as Meta or Microsoft, OpenAI is not a publicly traded company.
Instead, it has a complicated structure which involves a partnership between non-profit and for-profit arms.
Altman has suggested Musk was “a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and you know, instead, is just trying to say, like, “I’m gonna buy this” with total disregard for the mission.”