Elon Musk called OpenAI ‘evil’ for telling investors not to fund his company and other rivals

• OpenAI just secured $6.6 billion in its latest funding round.
• The company asked investors not to back its rivals like Elon Musk’s xAI, per Reuters.
• Musk, who is in an ongoing feud with OpenAI, called the company “evil.”

Elon Musk is once again throwing shots at the artificial intelligence company he co-founded.

OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with CEO Sam Altman and 9 other people in 2015, said on Wednesday that it completed a record funding round of $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation, making it the most valuable startup in the world.

That funding round, which included big-name investors like Thrive Capital, Microsoft, and Nvidia, had a stipulation that Musk isn’t so happy with: Don’t support OpenAI’s rivals.

According to anonymous sources speaking with Reuters, OpenAI asked investors for an exclusive funding agreement, in which they would refrain from backing five of its competitors.

The list, according to the report, was Perplexity, Glean, Anthropic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, and Musk’s xAI, which developed Grok.

The Financial Times also reported that OpenAI sought exclusivity.

On Wednesday, Musk responded to posts on X criticizing OpenAI’s request. He twice wrote, “OpenAI is evil.”

After leaving OpenAI in 2018, Musk’s relationship with the company and Altman became increasingly combative.

In February 2020, Musk criticized the company for a lack of transparency and commitment to safety.

In March, Musk accused the company in a lawsuit of violating its founding principle of building AI that benefits humanity. He later dropped the suit.

In August, Musk filed another lawsuit against OpenAI, this time arguing that the executives “deceived” him into cofounding the company.

Musk and a spokesperson for OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

While the request for an exclusive funding round is rare, it’s not unprecedented, according to venture capitalists who spoke with the FT.

Uber and Lyft, for example, asked investors not to back their rivals for six months to a year during fundraising rounds well before their initial public offerings, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015.

Some of OpenAI’s investors have already backed other AI startups. SoftBank, for one, has been doubling down on hardware and software after a string of disastrous pre-pandemic bets, like WeWork.