(Reuters) - Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence firm xAI will open-source "Grok", a chatbot rivaling OpenAI's ChatGPT, this week.

The development comes about two months after the Tesla CEO said he felt uncomfortable growing the carmaker into a leader in AI and robotics unless he had at least 25% voting control of the company.

Earlier this month, Musk sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, saying they had abandoned the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. 

In a podcast episode with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Musk suggested in November that he liked the concept of open-source AI.

The billionaire's startup launched the AI model to a small group of users that month.

In December, xAI rolled out its ChatGPT competitor Grok for Premium+ subscribers of social media platform X, aiming to create what Musk has said would be a "maximum truth-seeking AI"