Screenshots released by OpenAI on Friday show that one of its co-founders, Elon Musk, pushed for the establishment of a profit structure as early as 2017.

Last Friday, OpenAI launched a counterattack against one of its co-founders, Elon Musk. Last month, the billionaire requested a federal court to block OpenAI from transforming into a fully profit-oriented company.

In a blog post titled "Elon Musk Wants a Profitable OpenAI," the startup claimed that in 2017, Musk not only wanted but also effectively created a profit-oriented structure as the company's proposed new structure.

OpenAI wrote in the blog: "When he did not get majority ownership and full control, he left and told us that we would fail. Now OpenAI is a leading AI research lab, while Elon operates a competing AI company, requesting the court to block us from effectively fulfilling our mission."

Since Musk announced the debut of his OpenAI competitor xAI in July 2023, the startup has released the Grok chatbot and raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, part of which was used to purchase 0.1 million NVIDIA chips.

A member of OpenAI's legal team stated that Musk questioned OpenAI's nonprofit model from day one.

In an email to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2015, Musk wrote that OpenAI's "structure does not seem ideal," according to screenshots shared in the blog post. He added that "receiving a salary from a nonprofit organization would confuse the consistency of incentives," and it is "better to have a standard C corporation and a parallel nonprofit organization."

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman wrote in a text conversation with former Board of Directors member Shivon Zilis that his conversation with Musk "turned into a discussion about structure," and Musk "said that the non-profit organization was right in the early days, but may not be correct now," according to a blog screenshot.

According to the blog, Altman, Brockman, Musk, and others discussed the planned for-profit company OpenAI in the fall of 2017, but negotiations broke down due to disagreements over equity, control, and who would serve as CEO. Musk initially proposed that he should "clearly have preliminary control of the company," but he noted that "this situation would change quickly" when the Board of Directors had 12 to 16 members.

According to screenshots in the OpenAI blog post, Musk created a non-profit company called "Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc." in September 2017. A few days later, OpenAI rejected Musk's proposed for-profit terms and offered to continue the dialogue, but Musk responded that his proposal was "no longer on the table," saying, "the discussion is over."

In January 2018, Musk proposed to merge OpenAI with Tesla.

"The only way I can think of is the massive expansion of OpenAI and the massive expansion of Tesla AI, perhaps both simultaneously. The former requires a large increase in donation funding and needs highly credible individuals to join our Board of Directors. Currently, the situation on the Board of Directors is very weak," Musk wrote. He added, "Compared to Google, OpenAI is on a path to failure."

Screenshots show that Brockman outlined a lengthy plan that included the idea that the company should "make every effort to remain non-profit." In February 2018, Musk resigned from his position as co-chair of OpenAI.