A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday.

The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.” Altman responded to Musk on X, writing, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” using the previous name for the Musk-owned social-media platform and moving the decimal point in the billionaire’s bid for OpenAI one space to the left.

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Musk has filed a series of legal complaints accusing OpenAI of betraying its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit arm and colluding with its largest investor, Microsoft, to dominate the development of AI.

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OpenAI has called Musk’s legal claims baseless and overreaching and said the nonprofit will receive full value in its ownership stake of the for-profit. The company released documents in December that it said showed Musk previously supported turning OpenAI into a for-profit but walked away because he couldn’t get control of it.

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