OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was named in a lawsuit filed last week by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Getty
OpenAI hit back at Elon Musk in a blog post published on its website on Tuesday, responding to a lawsuit from one of its co-founders and former patrons.
Musk filed the lawsuit last week in San Francisco against the company, Chief Executive Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, claiming the company had deviated from its mission of building responsible AI. In the post, OpenAI said Musk reacted strongly after he unsuccessfully tried to make the company part of Tesla Inc.
“We are saddened that things have come to this with someone we deeply admired,” OpenAI wrote, “someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, launched a competitor, and then sued us as we began development.” without him, “make significant progress toward OpenAI’s mission.”
Tesla's billionaire CEO, co-founder of OpenAI, who is no longer involved in the company, claims in his lawsuit that the startup's close relationship with Microsoft Corp. undermined its original mission to develop open source technology free from undue corporate influence.
“To this day, OpenAI Inc.'s website continues to assert that its charter is to ensure that AGI 'benefits all of humanity,'” the lawsuit says. “But in reality, OpenAI Inc. has transformed itself into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a type of AI that doesn't yet exist but could theoretically do a variety of tasks better than humans.
Musk is suing, among other things, for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and allegations of unfair business practices. He first filed the lawsuit in 2019 as a donor to the nonprofit's parent organization, seeking to force San Francisco-based OpenAI to stop personally supporting Microsoft and Altman.
OpenAI did not comment publicly on Musk's lawsuit when it was originally filed on February 29. However, in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, the company said it “categorically disagrees” with the lawsuit.