Elon Musk is suing OpenAI’s top two leaders — Sam Altman and Greg Brockman — for manipulating him into co-founding the artificial-intelligence firm on the belief that it would be a nonprofit, two months after dropping a similar legal challenge against the same defendants.
The latest lawsuit, filed in Northern California federal court on Monday, alleges Musk was “courted and deceived” into founding the company in 2015 as an open-source, nonprofit-driven alternative to Google’s AI initiative DeepMind. The idea that OpenAI would act as a “meaningful counterweight” to DeepMind was the pitch that Altman sold Musk years ago.
“Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety and openness for the benefit of humanity, not shareholder value,” the lawsuit states. “But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy—the hook for Altman’s long con.”
Musk contends that after he offered significant time and financial resources to starting OpenAI, Altman betrayed the mission he set out for himself and his co-founders, as illustrated by the company’s eventual partnership with Microsoft.
“The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the lawsuit says. Like his first suit, Musk is seeking a jury trial again.
The original complaint, filed in San Francisco court in February, similarly stated that OpenAI’s board is more concerned with maximizing profits for Microsoft than benefiting customers.
Musk’s attorneys ultimately dropped that suit in June without providing a reason for doing so. However, the abrupt decision was preceded by OpenAI releasing a series of Musk’s emails suggesting the Tesla boss was more closely aligned with the entity’s for-profit vision than he let on in the litigation. Musk also seemed to be comfortable with moving away from open-source releases of the firm’s products.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to a conflict of interest with Tesla’s focus on AI and has since become an outspoken advocate for a more cautious approach toward innovating the advanced technology.
The multibillionaire has been critical of ChatGPT, arguing the OpenAI product is politically biased and trained “to be woke.” He then launched the first version of the “anti-woke” Grok on X late last year to compete with ChatGPT. However, according to Forbes, Grok isn’t free from complaints of wokeness either.
After forming an exclusive computing partnership with OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft has become its biggest backer with a reported $13 billion invested in the AI developer.