Musk is revamping a lawsuit against OpenAI

Tech billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and two of its founders after dropping a lawsuit a few months earlier.

Techsite The Verge found that the new lawsuit was filed in federal court in Northern California on Monday.

According to the indictment, CEO Sam Altman and CTO Gregory Brockman “assiduously manipulated” Musk into co-founding OpenAI by promising the company would be safer and more transparent than other AI developing, profit-driven tech companies.

The idea was to create a non-profit organization, backed and funded by Musk in order to attract world-class scientists to conduct leading AI research and development. “But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy, the hook for Altman’s long con,” the allegation says.

After Musk decided to lend his name to the venture, he invested significant time and tens of millions of dollars in seed capital and the recruitment of top AI scientists for OpenAI. “Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” Musk claims.

The Tesla and SpaceX owner also accuses Altman of ‘seizing’ the company and turning it into a profit-driven business concern.

“As a result of their unlawful actions, defendants have been unjustly enriched to the tune of billions of dollars in value, while Musk, who co-founded their de-facto for-profit start-up, has been conned along with the public, whom its vital technology was supposed to benefit,” the indictment says.

In the lawsuit Musk refers to the numerous investigations and lawsuits against OpenAI by multiple federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the California Attorney General.

Musk wants OpenAI to fulfill its original non-profit mission, pay damages and exclude Microsoft from using GPT-4 models and next generation large language models (LLMs).

Last February Musk launched a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, but was ultimately dropped in June.

Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff calls the new lawsuit “much more forceful”. He told The New York Times that OpenAI broke federal racketeering laws in a conspiracy to defraud Musk and that its contract with Microsoft would revoke the Redmond-based company’s right to OpenAI’s technology once artificial general intelligence (AGI) had been achieved.

In March 2023 Musk launched his own AI company called xAI.