Musk to make AI chatbot open source amid legal battle with OpenAI

Elon Musk said Monday that his artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI will make its chatbot Grok open source after he sued OpenAI earlier this month for straying from its original mission and failing to remain open source.

“This week, @xAI will open source Grok,” Musk said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the company, CEO Sam Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman for breach of contract, accusing them of abandoning OpenAI’s founding agreement in partnering with Microsoft.

According to Musk, he, Altman and Brockman agreed in founding the AI company that it would be a nonprofit that developed artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity and would remain open source.

Instead, Musk alleges, OpenAI is now developing and refining artificial general intelligence “to maximize profits for Microsoft” and has declined to provide details about the internal design of its latest AI model in order “to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.”

However, OpenAI fired back at Musk last week, claiming that the billionaire supported turning the company into a for-profit entity and “wanted us to merge with Tesla” or “wanted full control.”

“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the company wrote in a blog post.

OpenAI also argued that Musk “understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI,” pointing to a 2016 email that OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever sent to Musk and with which Musk agreed.

“As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open,” Sutskever wrote at the time. “The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science.”