Elon Musk filed a lawsuit Thursday against OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — and chief executive officer Sam Altman, alleging in the suit that the corporation and its leader have strayed from their original mission to prioritize the societal benefits of artificial intelligence and have instead focused on maximizing profits. The lawsuit pits two of the largest figures in the tech world against one another.
Musk helped found the company in 2015 as open-source, nonprofit alternative to Google’s AI initiative DeepMind. In the suit, Musk notes that OpenAI’s certificate of incorporation vows that the company “will benefit the public,” and that it is not “organized for the private gain of any person.”
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the suit, filed in a San Francisco court, says. “Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining [artificial intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
Musk has long criticized the company he once helped found, arguing that ChatGPT is politically biased and trained “to be woke.” In a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk said “there’s certainly a path to AI dystopia, which is to train AI to be deceptive.”
Musk’s goal in the suit is for the judicial system to force OpenAI to disclose its research to the public — which the company did before entering its relationship with Microsoft — and for the court to prevent OpenAI and Microsoft executives from profiting off artificial-intelligence development. He also seeks damages through the lawsuit, though his filing states that he would donate whatever amount he wins to charity.
The Musk lawsuit is not the only legal action OpenAI faces. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the tech company for copyright infringement, arguing that the creators of ChatGPT used millions of Times articles to train their AI platform. That suit has no specific number for financial damages, but it does contend that OpenAI should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damage.”