Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over Contract Breach
Arguing the non-profit’s Microsoft partnership focuses too much on “commercial interests.”
Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that the company has abandoned its initial purpose to create AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
Musk was a co-founder and backer of OpenAI himself, having been approached by Altman and Brockman in 2018. He agreed to launch OpenAI as a non-profit that would make the technology “freely available” to the public.
The entrepreneur stepped away from the company just three years later in 2018. He still donated to OpenAI, contributing $44 million USD between 2016 and 2020.
In the lawsuit, Musk’s lawyers argue that OpenAI and its founders have abandoned the purpose of the non-profit through its partnership with Microsoft, which was inked in 2019 and saw the tech giant provide the organization’s for-profit arm, OpenAI Global, with $1 billion USD, followed by an additional $10 billion USD in 2023.
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.‘s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawyers are argue that OpenAI’s tech, including GPT-4, is created “primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft.”
