Sam Altman clashes with Elon Musk over Tesla and Grok

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk exchanged words on the social media platform X, with the latter telling netizens, “not to let their loved ones use ChatGPT.” 

According to a report circulating on X, OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT allegedly contributed to the demise of nine users. Musk took a dig at Sam Altman’s company on Monday, saying the findings were “diabolical.” 

Don’t let your loved ones use ChatGPT https://t.co/730gz9XTJ2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 20, 2026

In a response posted on Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO reminded him that he once claimed ChatGPT was excessively restrictive to its userbase and was now blaming it for becoming “too relaxed.”

“Almost a billion people use it, and some of them may be in very fragile mental states. We will continue to do our best to get this right, and we feel a huge responsibility to do the best we can, but these are tragic and complicated situations that deserve to be treated with respect,” Altman wrote.

OpenAI is alleged to have caused five suicidal cases 

According to a BBC report from last October, OpenAI estimated that 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week showed signs of mania, psychosis, or suicidal thoughts. The company also reckoned that 0.15% of users had conversations with explicit indicators of suicidal intent.

OpenAI said it updated the chatbot to recognize and respond “safely and empathetically to signs of delusion or mania.” In his answer to Musk’s allegations, Altman admitted it was genuinely “hard to protect vulnerable users.”

“It is genuinely hard because we need to protect vulnerable users, while also making sure our guardrails still allow all of our users to benefit from our tools,” the CEO surmised.

Musk and Altman co-founded the organization in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab focused on developing artificial intelligence for the public good. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 and later bashed the company for trying to change its non-profitable business structure and its partnership with Microsoft. 

He then created xAI and AI model Grok, which has recently been slammed with legal charges for sexualizing images of minors. “I won’t even start on some of the Grok decisions,” Altman said, insinuating Musk’s product had more problems than ChatGPT.

Since late December 2025, Grok has been responding to prompts to undress people in photographs. xAI issued a statement on January 3, warning “anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content,” claiming they would be treated as if they had uploaded illegal content. 

Musk also dismissed the claims that Grok was sexualizing pictures of minors, writing on X: “I am not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero…Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images; it does so only according to user requests.”

Altman talks Tesla’s safety, electric car autopilot crashes, and deaths

Altman extended his criticism to Musk’s automotive business, Tesla, citing reports of fatal crashes. “Apparently, more than 50 people have died from crashes related to Autopilot. I only ever rode in a car, using it once, some time ago, but my first thought was that it was far from a safe thing for Tesla to have released.”

A late-December Bloomberg report examining fatal crashes in the US identified at least 15 deaths over the past decade, where occupants or rescuers were unable to open Tesla doors after crashes that led to fires. 

The automaker said it was considering engineering changes, including disabling locks automatically when battery voltage drops and releasing doors shortly before battery power is lost. 

Tesla’s design chief told Bloomberg in September that the company was working on a redesign of its door handles to improve electric and manual release prompts. The decision came against the backdrop of a lawsuit in November, when a crash in Wisconsin killed all five occupants of a Model S. 

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