Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing him of putting profit and commercial interests ahead of the public interest and breaching the contract.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015, said the company's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft builds on its founding promise to carefully develop AI and make the technology available to the public. He said it means to give up.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a long-simmering dispute between the former business partners. After Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018, the company became a leader in generative AI, developing ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate text and respond to queries in human-like prose. Musk, who runs his own AI company called xAI, said OpenAI doesn't focus enough on the risks of the technology.
Musk's lawsuit says he became involved with OpenAI because it was founded as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key element of that, according to the complaint, is to make the company's technology open source, which means sharing the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit division and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accuses OpenAI and Altman of breach of contract and fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is seeking to require OpenAI to open source its technology and to reimburse Mr. Altman for the money that Mr. Musk claims he earned as a result of its actions. OpenAI President Greg Brockman is also named as a defendant.
OpenAI and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit represents a new challenge for Altman, who was briefly ousted as OpenAI's chief executive last year before regaining control of the company. The company's relationship with Microsoft has also come under scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and United Kingdom.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement on news content used to train the chatbot.
The rift between Musk and Altman has been the subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley.
OpenAI's non-profit status was a major source of friction, according to the complaint, as tensions escalated between company executives seeking to profit from new AI technology and Musk, who wanted OpenAI to continue as a research institution. .
“Either do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI unless you commit to staying, otherwise I’m just an idiot for basically giving free money to startups. Discussion over. .”
The lawsuit seeks to show that Musk was an integral part of OpenAI's development. According to the complaint, Musk donated more than $44 million to OpenAI from 2016 to September 2020. He also rented the company's first office space in San Francisco and paid monthly expenses. According to the complaint, he was personally involved in hiring Google's top research scientist, Ilya Satskeva, to be OpenAI's chief scientist.
“Without Mr. Musk's involvement and significant support efforts and resources, OpenAI Inc. very likely would not have gotten off the ground,” the complaint states.
