Elon Musk is suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming the company has abandoned its original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for profit.
As reported by the Associated Press, Musk filed the lawsuit late on Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Alman have breached the founding agreement and that OpenAI is instead using AI to turn a profit.
Last year, Microsoft announced a multi-million dollar investment in OpenAI, and that partnership was cited as one of the reasons. Musk claims that top executives are “perverting” the original mission. Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI last year, and the reason still hasn’t been fully disclosed. However, a push from Microsoft helped bring Altman back and, in turn, caused most of the old board to resign.
Musk is suing for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices. He also hopes to injunction and prevent anyone from benefitting from OpenAI technology.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit filed Thursday says. “Under its new Board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
When OpenAI was founded in 2015, Musk was an early investor and even co-chaired its board with Altman. The lawsuit claims Musk invested “tens of millions” of dollars into the nonprofit’s research. He eventually resigned from the board in 2018, and at that time, OpenAI said the move would prevent conflicts of interest with Musk, who was recruiting AI talent for Tesla.
Shortly after Musk’s exit in 2018, OpenAI filed papers to incorporate a for-profit arm and slowly began shifting most of its workforce into that.
This isn’t the first lawsuit to hit OpenAI, as the company was sued by 17 authors, including George R.R. Martin in September 2023. Then in December, the company was sued by the New York Times, and just yesterday faced a new lawsuit from three other news organizations: The Intercept, RawStory, and AlterNet. That lawsuit alleges “at least some of the time,” ChatGPT reproduces “verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism without providing author, title, copyright or terms of use information contained in those works.”
