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

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk have long been at odds over everything from artificial intelligence to the way they run their respective social media platforms.

While this feud has been going on for nearly a decade – and even threatened to become unmanageable – the two tech billionaires now agree on at least one thing: their competitor OpenAI should remain a nonprofit organization.

Zuckerberg’s meta on Friday called on California’s attorney general 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 advantages that have allowed it to reach where it is today. That’s wrong. “OpenAI must not violate the law by taking, reappropriating and using assets it built as a charity for potentially enormous private profits,” Meta said in the letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

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

“If OpenAI is not held accountable for its decision to incorporate as a nonprofit, this could lead to a proliferation of similar startup companies that are notionally nonprofit until they are potentially profitable,” Meta wrote in the letter.

In doing so, Zuckerberg sided with Musk, who is waging an ongoing legal battle to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company.

Musk, one of 11 OpenAI co-founders who parted ways with the company early on, launched a second bid in November to block OpenAI from transitioning and asked a court for an injunction against the company.

The injunction request also argues that OpenAI and Microsoft, the AI ​​startup’s largest corporate investor, worked together to create a “for-profit monopoly” and engage in anti-competitive behavior that also occurred at xAI, Musk’s company for artificial intelligence, aims.

OpenAI 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 back to November 2015, a month before the company was founded.

In one of those emails, Musk responded to Altman’s suggestion of creating a nonprofit organization based in Delaware: “Furthermore, the structure does not appear to be optimal,” Musk wrote.

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

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

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

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