Mark Zuckerberg puts aside his feud with Elon Musk to go after OpenAI

• Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta urged California to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company.
• In doing so, Zuckerberg sided with his occasional nemesis, Elon Musk, who also wants to stop OpenAI.
• It seems the two tech billionaires have finally found some common ground.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk have long-standing beef over everything from artificial intelligence to how they run their respective social media platforms.

While that feud has lasted more than a decade — and has even threatened to turn physical — the two tech billionaires now agree on at least one thing: their competitor, OpenAI, must remain a nonprofit.

Zuckerberg’s Meta asked the California attorney general on Friday to stop OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Meta accused Sam Altman’s company of “exploiting” its nonprofit status to raise billions.

“OpenAI wants to change its status while maintaining all the benefits that allowed it to reach the point it has today. This is wrong. OpenAI should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and re-proving assets, it has built as a charity and use them for potentially huge private gains,” Meta said in the letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

OpenAI is one of Meta’s biggest competitors in the AI ​​tech race.

“Failure to hold OpenAI accountable for its choice to form a nonprofit could lead to a proliferation of similar startups that are theoretically charitable until they are potentially profitable,” Meta wrote in the letter.

With that, Zuckerberg sided with Musk, who is engaged in an ongoing legal battle to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit.

Musk, one of 11 OpenAI co-founders who left the company early, launched a second bid in November to prevent OpenAI from making the transition, asking a court for an injunction against the company.

The injunction request also argues that OpenAI and Microsoft, the largest corporate investor in AI startups, have worked together to build a “for-profit monopoly” that engages in anti-competitive behavior that also targets xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture.

OpenAI has fought back. On Friday, it published a blog post titled “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit.” The post contains a series of emails and messages between Musk and other co-founders, including Altman, dating as far back as November 2015, a month before the company was founded.

In one of those emails, Musk responded to Altman’s proposal to start a Delaware-based nonprofit organization: “Also, the structure doesn’t seem optimal,” Musk wrote.

Musk left the organization in 2018, in part because he believed OpenAI’s “probability of success was 0,” according to an OpenAI blog post from March. Musk has accused OpenAI of straying from its original mission of developing an artificial general intelligence that is safe and benefits humanity.

Nearly a decade after its founding as a nonprofit, OpenAI is now looking at switching to a for-profit project to generate more investor capital. In October, the company announced a $6.6 billion funding round, raising OpenAI’s valuation to $157 billion. However, this investment comes with a condition that OpenAI becomes a for-profit within two years.

Meanwhile, Meta said it plans to pour as much as $37 billion into infrastructure costs this year alone, mostly related to AI. Musk’s xAI told investors last month that it secured $5 billion in funding.

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