Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profit and commercial interests ahead of the public good in the development of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk, who helped develop OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company's multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft was a departure from its founding promise to carefully develop AI and make the technology publicly available.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a dispute between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018, the company emerged as a leader in generative AI, developing ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in human-like prose. Mr Musk, who has his own AI company called xAI, said OpenAI had not focused enough on the risks of the technology.
Mr. Musk's lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was founded as a nonprofit organization to develop artificial intelligence for the “good of humanity.” A key part of that, the lawsuit says, is making the technology open source, meaning the underlying software code is shared with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business entity and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accuses OpenAI and Mr. Altman of breach of contract and fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is demanding that OpenAI be required to open source its technology and that Mr. Altman pay back the money that Mr. Musk says was earned through its behavior. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.
OpenAI and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit is a new challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as CEO of OpenAI last year before regaining control of the company. The company's relationship with Microsoft is also under scrutiny by regulators in the United States, the European Union and Britain.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, alleging copyright infringement over news content used to train the chatbots.
The dispute between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman is causing intrigue in Silicon Valley.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI's nonprofit status was a major source of tension as tensions grew between company executives interested in making money from new AI technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab .
“Either do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have a firm commitment to stay, otherwise I'm just an idiot providing essentially free funding to a startup.” Discussions are over.”
The lawsuit seeks to portray Mr. Musk as an indispensable figure in the development of OpenAI. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Musk donated more than $44 million to OpenAI from 2016 to September 2020. He also rented the company's first office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. According to the complaint, he was personally involved in recruiting Ilya Sutskever, a top researcher at Google, as OpenAI's chief scientist.
“Without Mr. Musk’s commitment and significant support efforts and resources,” the lawsuit states, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”