The total philanthropic giving from Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Elon Musk to OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization-turned-company and maker of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, is unclear after Musk scaled back his original donation claims, from $100 million to $50 million, TechCrunch reports.

When TechCrunch investigated OpenAI’s funding to trace Musk’s original funds and verify his statements, it found approximately $15 million of donations made to OpenAI could be traced definitively to Musk. While it’s possible Musk could have made larger donations via a donor-advised fund, indirectly, or anonymously, TechCrunch found that, at most, Musk could have donated $57.4 million. “However, this number assumes that three founding donors (including Peter Thiel), six newer donors and multiple corporate supporters like Infosys, gave nothing at all,” TechCrunch reports. 

Musk has been openly critical of OpenAI following the organization’s move to become a for-profit company. “It does seem weird that something can be a nonprofit, open source and somehow transform itself into a for-profit, closed source,” Musk told CNBC. “This would be like, let’s say you funded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest and sold it for money.” 

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