Elon Musk cut off OpenAI's access to Twitter's data because he felt the company wasn't paying enough, report says

• In December, Elon Musk shut off OpenAI's access to Twitter's data, the New York Times reported.
• Musk reportedly felt the AI company was not paying enough for access, per the publication.

In December, only weeks after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the company had its access to Twitter's data shut down, per a report.

Two sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times that Twitter CEO and OpenAI cofounder, Elon Musk, was reportedly behind the decision. Musk felt that the approximately $2 million a year OpenAI was paying to license the company's data was not enough,

The AI company had been licensing Twitter's data to help build its AI chatbot, per the NYT.

Musk has been wary of advanced AI for some time and was becoming increasingly critical of OpenAI around the time of the decision.

Musk began criticizing the company's viral chatbot in December, suggesting the tech suffered from bias issues and that it was capable of lying. Since then, Musk has accused OpenAI of being a "maximum profit" company and has signed an open letter that called for a six-month pause on AI development.

Despite this hesitance around the technology, Musk is embarking on his own generative AI project, per reports. The company is reportedly called X.AI.

Musk has said he wants to create a chatbot similar to OpenAI's viral hit, potentially called "TruthGPT," that would be a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."

Musk has also been in talks with Jimmy Ba, a researcher and professor at the University of Toronto, about the new company, The Times reported, citing three people with knowledge of the matter. Musk has also hired top researchers from Alphabet's DeepMind to work at Twitter, per the publication.

Representatives for OpenAI and Elon Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.