Elon Musk is reportedly heading up a group of investors who have offered to buy OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, in a deal with an estimated value of $US97.4 billion (A$155 billion).
This major investment, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, could give Musk majority control of the company, which rivals his X.AI artificial intelligence company.
OpenAI is operated by a non-profit organisation that controls an entity called OpenAI LP, a for-profit company that exists within the larger company's structure.
The for-profit company took OpenAI from effectively worthless to a valuation of around $US100 billion in just a few years — and chief executive Sam Altman is largely credited as the mastermind of that plan and the key to the company's success.
Feud with Altman
In a long-time feud with Altman, Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, has filed a number of legal complaints against the company and Altman, claiming that the AI business and its leadership have misrepresented OpenAI as a philanthropy.
He claims that OpenAI has broken with its founding charter by seeking to make a profit with its AI tools.
"If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI, Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time," Marc Toberoff, a lawyer representing the investors, said in a statement.
"It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens,” he added.
In response, Altman said in a post on X, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $US9.74 billion if you want."
Lawsuits
Musk first sued OpenAI in June 2024 but dropped that after the company published a blog post that included several of Musk's emails from OpenAI's early days.
These appeared to show Musk acknowledging the need for the company to make large sums of money to fund the computing resources needed to power its AI ambitions, contrasting to the claims in his lawsuit that OpenAI was wrongly pursuing profit.
Musk filed a new lawsuit last August accusing OpenAI of racing to develop powerful "artificial general intelligence" technology to "maximise profits". He also accused the company of engaging in racketeering.
OpenAI, meanwhile, accused Musk of essentially being jealous that he was no longer involved in the startup after he left OpenAI in 2018 following an unsuccessful bid to convince his fellow co-founders to let Tesla acquire it.