Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, claiming that they had broken a deal by putting business interests and profit ahead of the general welfare when creating artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Mr. Altman and others, said that the business had broken its original promise to carefully develop artificial intelligence and make the technology open to the public by entering into a multibillion-dollar collaboration with Microsoft.
The case was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Thursday and claimed that OpenAI had become a de facto closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft, the biggest software company.
The lawsuit is the most recent development in a long-simmering dispute between the former business partners. Following Mr. Musk’s departure from the board of OpenAI in 2018, the business thrived in the generative AI space and developed ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating text and providing responses to queries in a manner like to that of a person. xAI, Mr. Musk’s own artificial intelligence startup, claimed OpenAI was not paying enough attention to the dangers associated with the technology.
According to Mr. Musk’s lawsuit, he joined OpenAI because it was founded as a nonprofit organization to advance artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” The complaint claimed that one important part of that was to release the technology’s underlying software code as open source, so making it available to the public. Instead, it limited access to its technology and established a for-profit commercial entity.
A jury trial is requested in the case, which charges Mr. Altman and OpenAI with unfair commercial practices, breach of fiduciary duty, and breach of contract. Mr. Musk is requesting that Mr. Altman return the money that he claims was made as a result of OpenAI’s actions and that OpenAI be forced to make its technology open source. The president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, is also listed as a defendant.
Requests for comments were not answered by Mr. Musk or OpenAI.
Mr. Altman, who was momentarily removed from his position as CEO of OpenAI last year before taking back control of the business, faces a new obstacle in the form of the lawsuit. Regulators in the US, EU, and UK are also keeping a close eye on the company’s partnership with Microsoft.
In December, the New York Times filed lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright violations of news articles that served as the chatbots’ training material.
There has been mystery about the disagreement between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman in Silicon Valley.
The lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of conflict as tensions increased between Mr. Musk, who wanted the business to stay a research lab, and company executives interested in trying to generate money off of new A.I. technologies.
At one occasion, Mr. Musk reportedly stated, “Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” according to the complaint. “Either you make a solid commitment to stay, or I’m just being an idiot and giving a startup basically free money, but I won’t sponsor OpenAI anymore. The conversation is now concluded.
The lawsuit attempts to portray Mr. Musk as a key player in the advancement of OpenAI. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Musk gave OpenAI contributions totaling more than $44 million between 2016 and 2020. In addition, he covered the monthly payments for the company’s first San Francisco office lease. According to the complaint, he personally oversaw the hiring of Google’s top research scientist, Ilya Sutskever, to serve as OpenAI’s chief scientist.
The lawsuit claims that “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources.”