OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit, dismissing his allegations by publishing old emails from 2015 and 2018, when he was still involved in its operations.

In a blog post the AI giant stated that despite the Twitter owner’s initial pledge of $1 billion, the company received less than $45 million from him since its founding in 2015.

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Meanwhile, it secured over $90 million from other donors to support its research, the company revealed.

This comes as Musk recently sued OpenAI and its Co-Founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, claiming they are putting profit before humanity by straying from their non-profit mission to develop beneficial and safe AI and instead pursuing profits by partnering with Microsoft.

The blog post, authored by OpenAI Co-Founders Brockman and Altman, alongside Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Wojciech Zaremba: “The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits.

“We are now sharing what we’ve learned about achieving our mission, and some facts about our relationship with Elon. We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”

It also revealed Musk wanted “absolute control” of the platform by merging it with Tesla, the company he is CEO of.

The blog post stated: “We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.

“He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla. In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us an email suggesting that OpenAI should “attach to Tesla as its cash cow”, commenting that it was “exactly right… Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn’t zero.

“Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla. When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars. In December 2018, Elon sent us an email saying “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI added it is making its technology broadly usable in ways that empowers people and improve their daily lives and is focused on advancing its mission as it continues to make its tools better.

Read the full blog post here.