Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in AI development ahead of the public good.
Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding promise to carefully develop artificial intelligence and make technology available to the public.
“OpenAI has become a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a feud between the former partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, the company became a leader in the field of genetic artificial intelligence and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and answer questions in human prose. Mr Musk, who has his own artificial intelligence company, called xAI, said OpenAI did not focus enough on the risks of the technology.
Silicon Valley insiders believe that genetic artificial intelligence, the technology behind ChatGPT, is a next-generation technology that could transform the tech industry as radically as web browsers did more than 30 years ago. But others, notably Mr. Musk, have said the technology could also be dangerous — perhaps even destroying humanity.
The lawsuit adds to a string of problems piling up for OpenAI. The company’s relationship with Microsoft also faces scrutiny from regulators in the United States, the European Union and Britain. It has been sued by The New York Times, several digital outlets, authors and computer programmers for scraping copyrighted material to train its chatbot. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Altman and OpenAI after it ousted the company’s board in November, before reinstating it days later.
Mr Musk’s lawsuit said he got involved with OpenAI because it was created as a non-profit organization to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity”. A key element of that, the lawsuit said, was to make the technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.
The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others, and that Mr. Altman and others return to Mr. Musk the money Mr. Musk gave to the organization. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.
OpenAI declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit could expose OpenAI to a lengthy and invasive legal review that reveals more about Mr. Altman’s firing and OpenAI’s pivot from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. That change, which was planned by Mr. Altman in late 2018 and early 2019, has been the source of attrition at OpenAI for years and contributed to the board’s decision to fire him as CEO.
Although Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the AI lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and turn it into a commercial enterprise that would operate together with his other companies. , including electric car maker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with the plan said. When his bid to take control failed, he left OpenAI’s board, the people said.
Speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit last year, Mr. Musk said he wanted to know more about the chaos that unfolded at OpenAI last year, including why Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder, joined other board members in firing the Mr. Altman in November. He said he was concerned that OpenAI had discovered some dangerous element of artificial intelligence, which is a question his legal team could investigate during the lawsuit.
“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr. Musk said at the DealBook conference. Referring to a powerful ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” he added, “The ring of power can corrupt and he has the ring of power.”
Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The feud between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has long been the subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley. The men first met during a tour of SpaceX, Mr Musk’s rocket company, and later bonded over their shared concerns about the threat artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction as tensions rose between company executives interested in monetizing the new AI technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab.
“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a non-profit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you make a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just a fool essentially giving free funding to a startup. The discussions are over.”
The lawsuit seeks to portray Mr. Musk as an integral figure in the development of OpenAI. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also leased the company’s original office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. He was personally involved in recruiting Mr. Sutskever, a top researcher at Google, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist, according to the complaint.
“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the lawsuit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. it would never have taken off.”
