Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of violating a contract by prioritizing profits and commercial interests in the development of artificial intelligence over the public good.
Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of his founding promise to carefully develop AI and make the technology publicly available.
“OpenAI has transformed itself into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” says the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a feud between former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Musk left the OpenAI board of directors in 2018, the company became a leader in the field of generative AI and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and answer queries in human prose. Musk, who has his own artificial intelligence company called xAI, said OpenAI did not focus enough on the risks of the technology.
Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit organization to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of this, according to the lawsuit, was making his technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Altman of breach of contract and fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Musk is calling for OpenAI to be required to make its technology open source and for Altman to return money Musk claims he earned as a result of his behavior. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is also accused.
OpenAI and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit is a new challenge for Altman, who was briefly ousted as CEO of OpenAI last year before regaining control of the company. The company’s relationship with Microsoft also faces scrutiny from regulators in the United States, the European Union and Britain.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement of news content that was used to train the chatbots.
The dispute between Musk and Altman has been the subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction, as tensions grew between company executives interested in trying to make money from the new AI technology and Musk, who wanted to remain a research laboratory.
“Either do something on your own or continue OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have firmly committed to staying, or I am just being a fool who is basically providing free funding to a startup. “The discussions are over.”
The lawsuit attempts to show Musk as an indispensable figure in the development of OpenAI. From 2016 to September 2020, Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also rented the company’s initial office space in San Francisco and paid monthly expenses. According to the complaint, he was personally involved in recruiting Ilya Sutskever, a prominent Google research scientist, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist.
“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and his significant supporting efforts and resources,” the lawsuit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”
