The two biggest names in AI are at it yet again, exchanging verbal blows on X, something they’ve gotten up to in the past as rivals in the emerging technology sector.
The verbal spat happened on Tuesday when Elon Musk—who also owns X—replied to a post by Doge Designer, which said that ChatGPT was linked to nine deaths, of which more than 50% were cases of deaths by suicide, which involved both kids and adults.
“Don’t let your loved ones use ChatGPT,” said Musk in the reply.
Sam Altman replied soon after in a detailed X post saying, “Sometimes you complain about ChatGPT being too restrictive, and then in cases like this you claim it’s too relaxed.”
Altman then went on to speak about ChatGPT’s extensive global use. “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 huge responsibility to do the best we can, but these are tragic and complicated situations that deserve to be treated with respect.”
After defending his platform, he took a stab at Musk’s Autopilot feature, an integration that allows assisted driving in Tesla models. He even made reference to Musk’s AI platform Grok, which is in use by millions of people today on X.
“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. I won’t even start on some of the Grok decisions,”
This is not the first time the two tech tycoons have butted heads. In August 2025, Musk accused Apple of openly favouring OpenAI when it came to Apple store rankings, making it impossible for any other company to rank.
Altman responded to the accusation, saying “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like,”