Elon Musk sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on Thursday, accusing the company of breaking its founding agreement and working to maximize profits for a key investor instead of humanity in general. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but stepped away from the company in 2018.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, focused on OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft.
Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and the X platform (formerly Twitter). Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“Under his new advice, [OpenAI] is not just developing, but actually perfecting an AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the document reads.
Related: Microsoft invests billions in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT
In the lawsuit, Musk strengthened his role in the story of OpenAI’s founding and said that Altman and Brockman had approached him in 2015 to create a non-profit open source company to benefit humanity. The lawsuit alleged that OpenAI “set fire to the founding agreement” last year when it released its latest GPT-4, which the lawsuit called a Microsoft product.
Related: The Salesforce CEO went to great lengths to capture OpenAI talent, but now Sam Altman is back
Musk asked the court to make OpenAI’s research and technology available to the public and to prevent Microsoft and OpenAI executives from benefiting financially from it.
Microsoft’s $13 billion, multi-year partnership with OpenAI is one that regulators in the US and UK are preparing to investigate. Microsoft has a 49% stake in the for-profit portion of OpenAI and can benefit from OpenAI’s advances in products like Word, Excel and Outlook.
Related: OpenAI presents a new governance model for overseeing AI safety
Musk launched his own artificial intelligence company called xAI last year, which directly competes with OpenAI’s offerings. xAI has already raised $500 million from investors.