Less than two months after he dropped his first lawsuit against OpenAI, Elon Musk he filed another complaint in August. He claims to be co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman they manipulated him into investing in a startup that started out as a nonprofit, and then got rich by draining it of “valuable technology and assets,” Bloomberg reports.
OpenAI currently has a more complicated structure, which includes, among others: a for-profit subsidiary. It was created in 2019 to help finance the high costs of developing artificial intelligence models, and has since attracted billions in external investment from corporations such as Microsoft.
Elon Musk’s bold campaign
“The lawsuit is the latest step in Elon Musk’s increasingly brazen campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage,” Altman commented in court Tuesday, asking a federal judge in Oakland, California, to dismiss Musk’s complaint. The dispute is intensifying as the fast-growing startup that has become a leader in artificial intelligence is considering switching from its current nonprofit model to for-profit, as Bloomberg News reported in September.
OpenAI will no longer be a nonprofit
“OpenAI is dedicated to the safe and beneficial development of artificial intelligence,” OpenAI and Altman said in their statement. “Musk once supported OpenAI in this mission, but abandoned the venture when his attempt to dominate it failed,” it added.
It’s been a tumultuous year for the San Francisco startup. Less than a year after the company’s board fired and then quickly rehired Altman as CEO, OpenAI has changed its board, more than doubled its workforce and lost a number of key leaders – including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and chief technology officer Mira Murati.
OpenAI, or altruism versus greed
However, this turmoil has not dampened ambition or investor interest in the company: in recent months, OpenAI has continued to deploy a range of AI services to a growing number of companies and consumers, and in October it raised one of the largest private investments in history, amounting to $6.6 billion. In June, Musk withdrew a similar lawsuit filed in a California state court that claimed OpenAI’s ties to its largest investor, Microsoft, forced the startup to stray from its mission of developing responsible artificial intelligence. OpenAI responded that Musk was touting “revisionist history” and called his legal claims “incoherent.”
In his latest lawsuit, Musk describes OpenAI as a “textbook story of altruism vs. greed.” Lawyers for the billionaire entrepreneur say Altman “intentionally courted and deceived Musk,” who expressed concerns about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence.
Musk founded a competition for OpenAI
Musk launched xAI Corp in 2023 as a competitor to OpenAI. The billionaire is fighting allegations in a Delaware lawsuit that his startup deprived one of his other companies – Tesla – employees and resources to the detriment of the shareholders of the electric vehicle manufacturer.