Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, rekindling a legal battle he had seemingly dropped in June, according to an August 5 complaint submitted in a California federal court.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, initially sued the company in February, accusing it of breaking its commitment to operate as a nonprofit. He attempted to withdraw his lawsuit in June after OpenAI published a blog post disclosing some of Musk’s private communications with the organization.
In this recent filing, Musk claims that Altman “deliberately courted and deceived Musk, exploiting his humanitarian concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence” and “manipulated Musk into co-founding their purported nonprofit, OpenAI, Inc.”
Musk asserts that he supported OpenAI’s nonprofit goals by investing significant time and tens of millions of dollars, as well as recruiting leading AI scientists. However, he alleges that as OpenAI neared launching a market-ready AI product, Altman changed the direction and sought to profit from it.
An OpenAI blog post from March revealed private emails suggesting Musk was aware of and supported the organization’s shift towards a for-profit model. Musk even seemed to endorse this shift, suggesting that only for-profit entities like Tesla could compete with tech giants such as Google.
OpenAI stated in early 2017 that building AGI would require substantial computational resources and that a for-profit model was necessary to obtain them.
Musk has since criticized OpenAI and for-profit AI technology, labeling ChatGPT’s creator as a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft” in a 2023 post on X, his social media platform.
