OpenAI is rejecting Elon Musk’s claims that the startup abandoned its original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, and heavily implies that co-founder Musk had little contribution to the company’s success.

OpenAI says its mission is to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that performs at or beyond the human level on a wide range of cognitive tasks. The Microsoft-backed startup adds that it must be safe, beneficial, and broadly distributed to everyone.

In response to the Musk lawsuit, alleging breach of contract and abandoning its mission, Open AI says that as far back as early 2017, it recognised and informed Musk that building AGI requires “vast quantities of compute” and needed billions per year, which was more than what the OpenAI team, including Musk, thought could be raised as a non-profit.

In a blog post released on Tuesday (March 5), OpenAI wrote, “As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control.”

But OpenAI and Musk could not agree to the terms of a for-profit because the startup felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over the firm.

“Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path,” OpenAI wrote.

The Microsoft-backed startup says since its inception in 2015, it raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial commitment of $1 billion in funding felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.

OpenAI has since become the face of generative AI.

Musk went on to found his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, launched last July.

READ: Elon Musk sues OpenAI for abandoning original mission for profit