Elon Musk is angry with OpenAI for asking investors not to fund rivals

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

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

OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with CEO Sam Altman and nine others in 2015, said Wednesday it had completed a record $6.6 billion funding round 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 about: Don’t back OpenAI rivals.

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

The list, according to the report, was Ilya Sutskever’s Perplexity, Glean, Anthropic, 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 wrote twice: “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 its 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 “cheated” him into co-founding the company.

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

While the request for an exclusive funding round is rare, it is not unprecedented, according to venture capitalists who spoke to 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, doubled down on hardware and software after a series of disastrous pre-pandemic bets such as WeWork.