Welcome to Internal Tech Emails: internal tech industry emails that surface in public records. 🔍 If you haven’t signed up, join 50,000+ others and get the newsletter:
Naming OpenAI
From: Greg Brockman
To: Elon Musk
Cc: Sam Altman
Date: Monday, November 23, 2015 3:35 PM
On the name front, the best three Sam and I brainstormed last night:
- Axon
- AI Summer
- Difference Engine
Curious if any of those appeal (no worries if you think they are all bad :)).
From: Elon Musk
To: Greg Brockman
Cc: Sam Altman
Date: Monday, November 23, 2015 4:10 PM
Axon is the best of the three, but I don’t love it. A bit too biological and saying it out loud sounds a lot like “Exxon”, one of the worst companies on Earth. I’m going back and forth on “Freemind”. Kinda like “Freeman” too, as it reminds me of the scientist protagonist in Half-Life, who was an awesome character, and it sounds like what we are essentially trying to achieve, which is maximum freedom of action for humanity.
From: Greg Brockman
To: Elon Musk
Cc: Sam Altman
Date: Monday, November 23, 2015 4:33 PM
Oof, good catch on Exxon.
Any reaction to “Cogito”? Sam and I were just discussing and like it a lot — has a nice individualistic feel to it.
From: Elon Musk
To: Greg Brockman
Cc: Sam Altman
Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 1:02 AM
Not bad. Sounds kinda cute. Most people won’t get the latin, but the ones we want to join will.
I’d support that.
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
X link
Threads link
Previously: 65+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Elon Musk in the full archive
Previously: Greg Brockman messages Ilya Sutskever: “What do you think Cogito as a name?” (November 24, 2015)
Previously: Elon Musk: “We could call this the Open Al Institute” (December 3, 2015)
Sam Altman emails OpenAI board
October 1, 2022
We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded. We can also (we believe) create a more aligned model than what others would release. At this point, 2.5 years after GPT-3, we don’t believe it presents much real risk. Any objections to this?
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
X link
Threads link
Previously: 30+ documents from Musk v. Altman and Sam Altman in the full archive
Inside The Tech Emails Files
See how the biggest companies in tech actually operate — in their own words.
The Tech Emails Files are 250+ internal documents pulled from court filings we track year-round. Strategy memos. Board emails. Messages between CEOs and execs at Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more.
Investors use it to understand how leadership actually thinks. Journalists use it for primary sources. Founders and operators use it to study how the biggest companies make decisions.
Upgrade to a paid subscription, and you’ll unlock access to the full archive:
Anthropic negotiates with the Pentagon
From: Dario Amodei
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2026 10:27 PM
To: Emil Michael
Cc: Sarah Heck
Subject: Re: Thank you for the meeting and next steps
Emil,
Thank you for this. A few points of clarification, because I think some of our intent may have gotten lost in the back and forth on legal language.
