Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc., speaks at the Atreju convention in Rome, Italy, Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023. The annual event, organized by Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, began in 1998 as a youth convention right-wing and has evolved into a political event, including ministers and members of the opposition.
Alessia Pierdomenico | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI disputed a key claim Tesla CEO Elon Musk took part in the lawsuit filed against the startup earlier this month.
As it tries to commercialize its ChatGPT chatbot and underlying AI models, OpenAI faces a series of legal battles, including from Musk and copyright infringement cases from the New York Times and the authors. OpenAI responded to Musk’s complaint last week by mocking him in a memo to employees and releasing emails implicating him that date back to his early days.
Musk, who has claimed breach of contract with the startup he backed, referred in his complaint earlier this month to a 2015 “constituent agreement” with him and two other OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The three agreed that a new AI lab would be a nonprofit organization that would benefit humanity and would not keep information private for commercial purposes, Musk said.
He went on to say that by releasing the GPT-4 large language model last year without providing scientific details for public consumption, OpenAI violated that agreement.
“There is no incorporation agreement, or any agreement with Musk, as the complaint itself makes clear,” OpenAI said in a document filed in the California Superior Court for the County of San Francisco. “The founding agreement is instead a fiction that Musk conjured up to unfairly lay claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, then abandoned, and then saw succeed without him.”
Musk cited OpenAI’s 2015 certificate of incorporation with the Delaware secretary of state, saying it “commemorated” the incorporation agreement. But OpenAI responded by saying Musk’s complaint lacked a real settlement.
The Microsoft-backed startup called Musk’s claims frivolous. But in a blog post on Monday he said he would ask the court to designate the case as complex and get dedicated handling of the case because it involves artificial intelligence and his allegations date back nearly 10 years .
In his complaint, Musk alleged that, regarding OpenAI’s 2017 plan to create a for-profit organization, he told Brockman, Altman, and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever to “[e]either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a non-profit organization.”
OpenAI said in its statement, dated March 6, that if the case were to be discovered, evidence would show that Musk was in agreement with the startup acquiring a for-profit structure.
Musk has his own artificial intelligence lab called X.AI, which released a chatbot called Grok available through X, formerly known as Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022. The startup will release Grok’s code under an open source license this week , Musk said in a X post on Monday.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users in November.
“Seeing the remarkable technological advances achieved by OpenAI, Musk now wants that success for himself,” OpenAI said in its statement. “He then brings this action accusing the defendants of breaching a contract that never existed and of duties that Musk was never owed, seeking damages calculated to benefit a competitor of OpenAI.”
CLOCK: Sam Altman rejoins OpenAI’s board of directors
