Elon Musk renews lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman — Filing

Musk claims he was misled about the ChatGPT creator’s true purpose.

Elon Musk filed a new lawsuit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, reigniting the legal fight after appearing to drop the case in June, according to an Aug. 5 complaint filed in a United States federal court in California. 

Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015 and sued the company in February for allegedly violating promises to operate as a nonprofit. Musk filed a motion to drop his lawsuit in June after OpenAI published a blog post revealing some of Musk’s private exchanges at OpenAI.

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In the latest filing, Musk alleges Altman “intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence” and “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture, OpenAI, Inc.”

In support of OpenAI’s nonprofit mission, Musk “lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top AI scientists.” Then, as OpenAI approached a market-ready AI product, “Altman flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in,” according to the filing.

In its March blog post, OpenAI revealed private emails suggesting that Musk was aware of OpenAI’s for-profit pivot. He even appears to endorse the idea, arguing that only for-profit enterprises, such as Musk’s flagship business “Tesla…could even hope to hold a candle to Google” and other technology giants.

“In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute,” OpenAI said. “We and Elon recognized a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources.”

Musk has since become a critic of OpenAI — and of for-profit AI technology in general — calling the ChatGPT creator a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” in a 2023 post on the X platform.

Musk’s social media platform, X, is reportedly under scrutiny by Irish regulators amid reports that a change in default settings allowed users’ X data to be fed into the training of Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok.

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