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Elon Musk has filed a brand new lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, renewing his claim that the unreal intelligence startup he co-founded strayed from its mission to assist humanity when it signed a industrial partnership with Microsoft.
The tech billionaire's lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in California, about two months after he abruptly withdrew an identical lawsuit in state court.
The latest filing includes recent allegations that Altman and one other OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman, violated federal anti-civil racketeering laws, in addition to claims that Musk and other investors were tricked into investing in the corporate by OpenAI's “fake humanitarian mission.”
“Elon Musk's case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook example of altruism versus greed,” the lawsuit states. “Altman, together with other defendants, intentionally courted and defrauded Musk by exploiting Musk's humanitarian concern concerning the existential threats posed by AI.”
It says Altman and Brockman “eagerly manipulated Musk into co-founding their dubious nonprofit company by promising him it could take a safer and more open course than the profit-driven tech giants.”
“As OpenAI's technology approached transformational (artificial general intelligence), Altman turned the story around and commenced benefiting from it,” the lawsuit says. “In partnership with Microsoft, Altman built an opaque web of for-profit OpenAI subsidiaries, engaged in rampant self-dealing, took over OpenAI's board of directors, and systematically stripped the nonprofit of beneficial technology and personnel.”
The startup signed a $10 billion investment take care of Microsoft in January 2023, giving the tech giant a share of its profits and allowing it to integrate OpenAI's technology into its cloud and search engine services.
Since 2019, Microsoft has invested around $13 billion in OpenAI, giving it a head start over other Silicon Valley technology giants within the arms race to develop powerful AI systems.
However, Microsoft's complex investment structure in OpenAI has since triggered antitrust investigations by US and EU regulators.
In Musk's latest lawsuit, the court has asked for a ruling on whether OpenAI's latest models have achieved AGI – software that may mimic human intelligence. The lawsuit says this benchmark would render OpenAI's licensing agreement with Microsoft “null and void” because Microsoft will only receive a share of OpenAI's “pre-AGI” profits through the investment. Musk claims OpenAI has a financial interest in delaying a public announcement that it has achieved AGI.
In addition, he’s demanding damages based on “an accounting of all gains, profits and advantages” that OpenAI has made through Musk’s contributions.
The renewed legal battle is the most recent twist in an ongoing battle between Musk and Altman, two outstanding Silicon Valley figures locked within the race for AI supremacy. It began when Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 after disagreements over the direction of research. OpenAI's for-profit division was founded a 12 months later.
Musk founded his own for-profit AI startup, xAI, last 12 months. Last month, he said he would ask Tesla's board to approve the automaker he leads investing $5 billion in the corporate. xAI was valued at $18 billion in a funding round in May.
OpenAI was valued at $86 billion in a young offer for worker stock that closed in February. Musk claimed within the lawsuit that the corporate was “recently valued at a staggering $100 billion.”
OpenAI declined to comment on the brand new lawsuit. It dismissed Musk's earlier suit, calling the claims “incoherent and frivolous,” and published a blog post that included several emails from Musk from the corporate's early days that appeared to indicate he recognized that the corporate would wish to lift large sums of cash to fund the computing resources needed to develop AI models.
A lawyer for Musk, Marc Toberoff, told the New York Times that the “previous lawsuit had no bite.” “This is a way more vigorous lawsuit,” he said.
