PARIS (news agencies) — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has dismissed a $97.4 billion takeover bid led by rival Elon Musk, but the unsolicited offer could complicate Altman’s push to transform the maker of ChatGPT into a for-profit company.
“We are not for sale,” Altman said Tuesday at an artificial intelligence summit in Paris.
Musk’s bid, announced Monday, is the latest in a bitter years-long battle with Altman over control of the AI startup they both helped found a decade ago as a nonprofit and is now a leading force in the global boom surrounding generative AI technology.
“OpenAI has a mission,” Altman told France’s AI minister in an on-stage discussion Tuesday mobbed by tech industry workers and investors. “We are an unusual organization and we have this mission of making AGI benefit all humanity. And we are here to do that.”
Its stated aim since its founding in 2015 is to safely build futuristic, better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Musk, an early investor and board member, quit OpenAI in 2018 after an internal power struggle left Altman in charge.
Their public feud has escalated over the past year as Musk sued OpenAI and is working to grow his own AI company called xAI, part of a business empire that includes Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X. Musk also now holds power as a top adviser to President Donald Trump in reshaping the U.S. government, and has publicly questioned OpenAI’s Trump-backed private investment project for building AI data centers in the United States.
The offer complicates OpenAI’s plan to shift its structure away from its nonprofit roots to a company beholden to shareholders.
OpenAI’s nonprofit board will need to consider Musk’s offer. It’s not Altman alone who can accept or reject it, though the chair of the board, Bret Taylor, echoed Altman’s approach and declared “OpenAI is not for sale” at a Wall Street Journal event Tuesday in Palo Alto, California.
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