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Elon Musk is once again going after the tech company he helped found. Musk filed a lawsuit Monday suing OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging they \u201cmanipulated\u201d Musk to help create the company.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit<\/a> claims OpenAI breached the company\u2019s initial commitment to benefit humanity in favor of business interests. Altman and OpenAI\u2019s leaders \u201cintentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on X<\/a> owner\u2019s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence,\u201d the complaint alleges.<\/p>\n Musk was an early investor<\/a> in OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit in December 2015<\/a>. OpenAI restructured and formed OpenAI LP, a for-profit entity in 2019<\/a>. OpenAI and Microsoft<\/a> announced a partnership <\/a>that same year that involved a $1 billion investment. The alliance has since evolved and in 2023 expanded<\/a> to include a multi-year, multi-billion investment reported to be $10 billion. Musk, in turn, felt betrayed by OpenAI <\/a>and its partnership with Microsoft as they \u201cestablished an opaque web of for-profit OpenAI affiliates, engaged in rampant self-dealing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,\u201d the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n The suit today comes two months after he withdrew an earlier lawsuit against OpenAI, in which Musk similarly alleged<\/a> the artificial intelligence research platform had abandoned its initial mission of altruism and widespread public sharing of its technology. Musk pulled the complaint without explanation the day before a judge was set to rule on its dismissal in June. In a March 2024 blog post<\/a> in response to the lawsuit, OpenAI said, \u201cThe mission of OpenAI is to ensure [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial A.G.I. and helping create broadly distributed benefits.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s lawyer Marc Toberoff said in a statement to Fortune<\/em>, \u201cNo amount of spin and deflection by Defendants will evade accountability for their self-dealing and intentional misrepresentations to Musk and the public.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEven to this day Defendants cloak themselves in altruism\u2014but as the world now knows the Emperor has no clothes,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Musk and Altman were locked in a power struggle over OpenAI since before 2018, the year Musk left the company. Fearing OpenAI had fallen behind Google\u2019s DeepMind<\/a> AI research lab, Musk reportedly<\/a> wanted to take sole control of the AI company. OpenAI\u2019s founders did not agree, leading Musk to vacate his board position. At the time, Musk publicly said he stepped down from OpenAI because his role there conflicted with his work at Tesla<\/a>. In its blog post in response to Musk\u2019s March lawsuit, OpenAI included email excerpts from Musk detailing an argument for Tesla absorbing OpenAI and indicating he supported OpenAI\u2019s need for a for-profit arm to \u201ccreate a more sustainable revenue stream over time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow,\u201d Musk wrote in an email<\/a> on Jan. 31, 2018. \u201cI believe attachments to other large suspects (e.g. Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to an incompatible company DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cElon\u2019s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,\u201d an OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s own AI anxieties have been well documented for over a decade<\/a>, with the Tesla boss advocating for the creation of a government committee to research and regulate the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAs AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that between a person and a cat, maybe bigger,\u201d he said in an interview<\/a> with tech journalist Kara Swisher in 2018.<\/p>\n AI has the potential to lead to \u201ccivilization destruction<\/a>\u201d Musk said in April 2023, a month after he, along with several other tech leaders, signed a petition calling for a six-month pause<\/a> in AI development following the release of GPT-4.<\/p>\n But for all Musk\u2019s criticisms on AI that span beyond his disdain for OpenAI itself, Musk has sunk much of his energy in his own AI ventures. He has spoken at length about the development of Dojo, a supercomputer<\/a> that would train Tesla\u2019s network of self-driving cars. Musk founded xAI in March 2023 with the goal \u201cto understand the true nature of the universe\u201d\u2014and compete with OpenAI.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s xAI venture raised $6 billion in May 2024 from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Saudi investor Kingdom Holding. Considered one of the better-funded AI projects to go head-to-head with OpenAI, xAI has a $24 billion valuation<\/a> compared to OpenAI\u2019s $80 billion worth.<\/p>\n While Musk\u2019s attacks on OpenAI are centered around his ethical concerns, xAI has received similar criticisms. After last November\u2019s introduction of Grok, the company\u2019s first AI model in the form of a sassy chatbot integrated in X, experts warned the product\u2019s supposed anti-political correctness risked proliferating biases and misinformation in the form of the model\u2019s hallucinations.<\/p>\n \u201cElon Musk, on the other hand, decimated the trust and safety team at [X] and intends to make this Chatbot less politically correct\u2014aka more rude and inappropriate,\u201d Reid Blackman, AI ethics adviser at Virtue Consultants, told the Financial Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Tesla and Microsoft did not immediately respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nMusk\u2019s big stakes in AI<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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