Elon Musk files new lawsuit accusing OpenAI co-founders of profit-driven betrayal Elon Musk files new lawsuit accusing OpenAI co-founders of profit-driven betrayal
Musk claims he was misled into co-founding OpenAI by Sam Altman.
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Updated: Aug. 5, 2024 at 7:17 pm UTC
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Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit to reignite his dispute with OpenAI and its cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
This move comes less than two months after he withdrew an initial legal action filed in March against the AI startup in June.
New lawsuit
On Aug. 5, Musk’s legal team filed a new lawsuit accusing Altman and Brockman of violating the founding agreement by prioritizing profits over the public good.
Musk contends that the cofounders misled him into co-founding OpenAI by capitalizing on his concerns about AI risks. He described the conflict as a classic clash between “altruism and greed.”
The lawsuit stated:
“The idea that Altman sold Musk was that a non-profit, funded and backed by Musk, would attract world-class scientists, conduct leading AI research and development, and as a meaningful counterweight to Google’s DeepMind in the race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).”
Instead, Musk alleged that Altman and Brockman shifted OpenAI’s focus from its original charitable mission to self-enrichment, highlighted by a lucrative partnership with Microsoft. Last year, Microsoft secured a non-voting board seat at OpenAI following Altman’s brief dismissal and subsequent reinstatement.
However, Microsoft relinquished its observer seat in July amid strong regulatory scrutiny across various jurisdictions, including the United States.
Meanwhile, the new suit, lodged in federal court in Northern California, also includes allegations of racketeering and assertions that OpenAI breached its commitment to keep its technology open source.
Considering this, Must said he brought the lawsuit to “divest Defendants of their ill-gotten gains.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and significantly influenced its early growth through major funding, research guidance, and recruitment of top talent. However, he left the company in 2018.
Since then, Musk has frequently expressed concerns about the risks artificial intelligence poses to humanity and has founded a private for-profit company, x.AI, which is currently working on an open-source AI model, Grok.
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OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company committed to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence helps all of humanity.
Microsoft
Microsoft is an American multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, and personal computers.
Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that is most commonly known for its search engine that was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998.
South African-born Elon Musk has founded several companies, including X.com (which later became PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company since 2019.