OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, on Tuesday denied Elon Musk's accusations of "betrayal" of its original mission and said it would push to have them dismissed in court.
The boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015 along with Sam Altman but left the organization in 2018 and is now one of its most vocal critics.
Musk launched a legal case against OpenAI last week, arguing in documents filed in a San Francisco court that the firm was always intended as a nonprofit entity.
"We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims," OpenAI and its executives said in a blog post.
OpenAI captured the public imagination in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, which can generate poems and essays and even succeed in exams.
The firm started as a non-profit dedicated to developing "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), a term loosely defined as a kind of AI that would outstrip human capabilities on all measures of intelligence.
The aim was for OpenAI to guarantee that such technology would be safe for humanity.
OpenAI has received about $13 billion in investment from Microsoft in recent years, and both companies market AI services to developers and individuals.