Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, wherein he accused the company of abandoning its non-profit mission, is back in the headlines. Musk has now revised the said lawsuit, after it was briefly withdrawn in August for this revision. As per the latest amended lawsuit, Musk is now naming Microsoft as one of the defendants as well, for directly backing OpenAI with billions of dollars throughout its history.
In a rather strongly worded lawsuit, Musk terms OpenAI a “$157Bn market-paralyzing gorgon” and accuses it of breaking “every principle of law governing economic activity”. The suit says, “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators.”
The amended filing also adds new plaintiffs: Neuralink exec and ex-OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis and Musk’s AI company, xAI.
Elon Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI, when the company was initiated as a purely research entity to work on AI and its uses. He later left in 2018, when disagreements around the direction OpenAI was taking, starting arising within the leadership. Musk, by his own admission, wanted the non-profit mission to continue.
Apart from accusing it of the abandonment of its non-profit mission, Musk also accused OpenAI of stifling competition, by asking its investors to not fund in competitive AI startups. Some of these startups wherein OpenAI investors such as Tiger Global, have been asked to not invest, includes other LLM developers like Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new company, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), is also on the list.
