Elon Musk Files New Lawsuit Against OpenAI and its Founders

Elon Musk is reviving his legal fight with OpenAI today with a new lawsuit filed against the ChatGPT maker and two of its founders, current CEO Sam Altman and current President Greg Brockman (via Reuters). The new lawsuit filed in the Court for the Northern District of California claims that the two OpenAI founders betrayed the original non-profit nature of a company Musk co-founded and backed financially for a couple of years.

This new lawsuit is quite similar to the one Musk previously filed back in March before withdrawing it three months later without providing a reason. Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015 and left in 2018, a couple of years before the AI startup released its most innovative products and kickstarted a new AI gold rush.

“After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top Al scientists for OpenAI, Inc., Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportion,” the lawsuit boldly claims.

The lawsuit once again criticizes OpenAI’s decision to keep its latest models secret and and license them exclusively to Microsoft. “The reason for the secrecy is obvious: Defendants and Microsoft stand to make a fortune selling this technology to the public, which would not be possible if the non-profit made its research and technology freely available, as Altman had repeatedly promised Musk,” the lawsuit reads.

In its reponse to Musk’s original lawsuit, OpenAI claimed that it made its breakthrough technology available for free to millions of users. The company also shared some old emails from Elon Musk showing that he apparently agreed with a for-profit pivot for OpenAI, all while keeping its technology closed. The emails also revealed that Musk suggested the OpenAI co-founders to merge the AI startup into Tesla to give the company more resources. Musk ultimately left OpenAI over these strategic disagreements, and he went on to create a separate startup named xAI, which is currently developing the Grok chatbot.

After Musk’s lawyers dropped his previous lawsuit against OpenAI and its founders in June, it’s hard to say if this new complaint has to be taken seriously. However, the new lawsuit comes at a time when regulators around the world are continuing to scrutinize Microsoft’s multi-billion partnership with OpenAI.