Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and its CEO for Breaching the Company’s Non-Profit Mission

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The lawsuit filed yesterday at the Superior Court of San Francisco says that OpenAI broke its founding agreement in 2023 when it launched its GPT-4 model with a closed model and allowed Microsoft to sell access to it.

“The internal details of GPT-4 are known only to OpenAI and, on information and belief, to Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads. “GPT-4 is hence the opposite of “open AI.” And it is closed for propriety commercial reasons: Microsoft stands to make a fortune selling GPT-4 to the public, which would not be possible if OpenAI—as it is required to do—makes the technology freely available to the public.

As you probably know, Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, a non-profit organization created in 2015. Musk later left the company in 2018, officially to avoid any conflicts of interests due to his position as CEO of Tesla, a company also developing its own artificial intelligence technology.

After Musk left his seat at the OpenAI board, OpenAI Global LLC, the company’s for-profit subsidiary started to thrive. Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in the company and invested billions of dollars in it, and OpenAI started to get a lot of attention after launching its generative AI apps DALL-E and ChatGPT in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

Microsoft now has an exclusive licence OpenAI’s GPT-4 language, and the company leveraged this technology to launch its various “Copilot” products. And Musk, who also launched its own AI startup named “xAI” last year, is now accusing OpenAI and its CEO of “unfair competition and other unfair business practices.”

Elon Musk’s lawsuit comes after the US FTC, the UK CMA, and the EU Commission all launched separate investigations into Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Meanwhile, the competition isn’t resting on its laurels, with Google also investing huge resources into its Gemini family of AI models.