OpenAI CFO says Musk shouldn’t use legal challenges to compete

Elon Musk’s legal challenge to stop OpenAI Inc. from becoming a for-profit company is equivalent to “lawfare” and the ChatGPT maker views his complaints as competitive maneuvering, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said.

“We hope that he won’t keep resorting to using law” to compete, Friar said in an interview at Bloomberg House during the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. Musk, who owns rival xAI and was previously part of the team that launched OpenAI as a nonprofit, has claimed the company is breaching its founding mission.

“Building AI is a very capital-intensive business, and I think even he recognized very early on that it would require us to be much more than a nonprofit,” she said.

Friar is helping the artificial intelligence company line up funding and create new revenue streams. She said the company would likely have to continue to fundraise, but weighed the pros and cons of a public listing. An initial public offering could give OpenAI access to new kinds of financing, such as structured debt, that could bring down costs of raising capital, she said in the interview. The next cutting-edge GPT model will likely cost billions of dollars to develop, Friar has said.