After a high-stakes battle in the courts this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has looked to cool things down with his nemesis and former co-founder of the ChatGPT maker. Altman, who is hosting a party for the launch of the company’s latest GPT-5.5 model, also invited Elon Musk to the event even as tensions between the two rivals heated up in court this week.
Notably, OpenAI’s party for GPT-5.5 is set to be held in San Francisco on 5 May, 2026, with selected users being sent invites along with travel and accommodation. Altman used X (formerly Twitter) to share an online form for interested attendees to RSVP for the event and noted that the company’s coding assistant, Codex, would choose the attendees who registered or replied to the announcement post.
The registration for the event didn’t last long, and Altman noted that the company would ‘plan bigger parties for future releases.’
While Musk is unlikely to be among those registering for the private event, one user on X saw the lighter side of things and suggested that the billionaire would crash the GPT-5.5 party acting as ‘the witch in Sleeping Beauty and deliver a powerful curse.’
However, Altman, while replying to the post, confirmed that the former OpenAI co-founder is welcome to attend the event.
Altman wrote back, “he can come if he wants. world needs more love”
Why is Elon Musk suing OpenAI?
After helping co-found OpenAI in 2015, Musk left the AI startup in 2018 over disagreements with its leadership, which included Altman along with Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Musk began taking aim at his former company and later charged OpenAI with diverting from the company’s founding mission of building AI for the benefit of humanity in favour of a profit-driven mission backed by Microsoft.
Musk claims he donated around $38 million to OpenAI with the understanding that the technology developed by the startup would be open-source and developed for the benefit of humanity. However, Musk alleges that Altman and Brockman preyed on his ‘well-known concerns about the existential harms posed by AI’ to fund what they ‘falsely claimed would be a ‘nonprofit’ devoted to the safe and open development of AI’.
The lawsuit was filed by Musk in March 2024 against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, which later also went on to include Microsoft. The case went to trial this week in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, headed by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
The first week of the trial was shadowed by testimony from Musk, while Altman and Brockman will be testifying later this month.
Judge Rogers warned both Altman and Musk, noting, “Try to control—all of you—your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside the courtroom.”
Meanwhile, the trial also led to Altman missing out on an event earlier in the week hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI in San Francisco, announcing the new agentic AI development efforts.
“Sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but my schedule got taken away from me,” Altman said during a video played at the event.
