Billionaire Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breaching their contract. The new legal action by Musk also includes charges of fraud and manipulation against the defendants. The lawsuit is the latest after Musk withdrew a similar lawsuit in June.
The new complaint alleges that Altman deliberately misled him to invest in OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that Altman had earlier assured OpenAI would be a non-profit company aimed at developing an artificial general intelligence, open source. Musk contends he invested significant time and tens of millions of dollars into OpenAI, only for Altman, in conjunction with Microsoft, to take control of the company and drive it toward monetization.
It also refers to investigations and legal processes against OpenAI and Altman by American and European authorities. Musk claims he himself, along with the public, was misled by OpenAI and Altman. It is an attempt at executing the initial contract he feels existed with OpenAI, seeking damages in addition. Moreover, Musk wants to prohibit Microsoft from using the GPT-4 models under the claim that these are AGI models and thus outside the scope of the Microsoft license agreement.
Earlier this year, Musk had filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI for similar reasons. Shortly after, OpenAI published a number of emails between Musk and the company, revealing that Musk had, in fact, supported a closed-source strategy quite contrary to his present assertions. The company said it had never reached an agreement on a formal contract with Musk, and Musk was seeking to tie the company to Tesla to help develop self-driving technology at a time when Musk wanted to be OpenAI's CEO. OpenAI also claimed that Musk had agreed to their plan for a for-profit company.
Why the lawsuit was pulled in June was not explained. This new lawsuit, said Marc Toberoff, a lawyer for Musk, is "more robust," he told The New York Times.
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