(Reuters) -Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has filed with the U.S. securities regulator to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering, according to a filing on Tuesday.
The company has raised $134.7 million in equity financing from a total offering amount of $1 billion, the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed.
Fundraising for AI remains a bright spot for startups this year, following OpenAI's launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT last year and raising of $10 billion from its strategic backer Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT). Regulators, however, are concerned about the potential use of the technology to spread misinformation.
Musk has been vocal about his plans to build safer AI. In a Twitter Spaces event earlier in the year he said that rather than explicitly programming morality into its AI, xAI will seek to create a "maximally curious" AI.
The billionaire, who has criticized Big Tech's AI efforts as ridden with censorship, in July launched xAI, calling it a "maximum truth-seeking AI" to rival Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI.
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has created a frenzy for generative AI technology around the world, but stepped down from the board in 2018.
XAI last month launched "Grok" a chatbot rivaling OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The artificial intelligence startup will be integrated into his social media platform X and also be available as a standalone app, Musk said in a post in November.
The team behind xAI, which launched in July this year, comes from Google's DeepMind, the Windows parent, and other top AI research firms.