ELON Musk has accused OpenAI’s Sam Altman of betraying his trust by creating technology for profit rather than “the good of humanity” in a scathing new lawsuit.
The suit, filed in the California district court, is not Musk’s first attempt at suing Altman and his company, which played a role in popularizing artificial intelligence technology.
The SpaceX founder first sued in March and withdrew the complaint in June – but it appears he has reignited the fight.
In court documents reviewed by The U.S. Sun, Musk accuses Altman and an associate of deceiving him into financially backing the company.
Specifically, Musk’s lawyers claim he was duped into believing OpenAI would be a non-for-profit organization that sought to serve the public.
“The idea Altman sold Musk was that a non-profit, funded and backed by Musk, would attract world-class scientists, conduct leading AI research and development,” the lawsuit reads.
Musk’s lawyers note that OpenAI was meant to serve “as a meaningful counterweight to Google’s DeepMind in the race for Artificial General Intelligence” by making its code freely accessible to the public.
News broke in 2013 that Google planned to acquire DeepMind, then one of the most advanced AI companies in the field.
Musk’s lawyers claim he was “deeply troubled by this development” and draw a comparison to how he runs SpaceX and Tesla; in the case of the latter, by making patents “open and available for public use.”
The tech tycoon “believed that in the hands of a giant private company like Google, AGI would pose a particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity,” and unsuccessfully attempted to stop the sale, the lawsuit claims.
Musk accuses Altman of “presenting himself” as sharing in concerns over the “threat” posed by AI – though it is unclear just what this means.
“Altman assured Musk that the non-profit structure guaranteed neutrality and a focus on safety and openness for the benefit of humanity, not shareholder value,” the lawsuit reads.
“But as it turns out, this was all hot-air philanthropy—the hook for Altman’s long con.”
According to the document, Altman attempted to “woo” Musk with different proposals and ultimately won his support by pitching a lab that sought to “create the first general AI…and use it for general empowerment.”
“The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world,’” the suit reads.
Altman recruited Stripe’s CTO Gregory Brockman to seal the deal, and in November 2015, Musk agreed to “commit funding and help recruit the top scientists necessary to make Altman’s project a success provided that—as Altman and Brockman had repeatedly promised—OpenAI, Inc. would be a non-profit.”
This promise was reaffirmed when OpenAI filed a Certificate of Incorporation with the Delaware Secretary of State in December 2015.
Musk claims he became OpenAI’s largest financial backer, contributing a total of $44 million.
But relationships broke down between 2017 and 2018, when Altman and Brockman “moved to recast the non-profit as a moneymaking endeavor to bring in shareholders, sell equity, and raise capital.”
The group struck a deal with Microsoft, and Musk claims the company’s views didn’t align with the mission he envisioned for OpenAI.
“Whereas Musk was concerned that AI posed an existential danger to humankind and the technology should be decentralized and open, Nadella and Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates minimized Musk’s concerns as “panic” and too far off in the future,” the suit reads.
The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of establishing a web of for-profit companies.
“When Defendants launched OpenAI, L.P. (now OpenAI OpCo, LLC), they drained the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. of most of its staff and transferred them over to the new company, which also now houses much of OpenAI’s research and development,” the lawsuit reads.
“Altman and Brockman too are now employees of the private, for-profit OpenAI OpCo, LLC, which conveniently shields them from the public oversight and financial disclosures non-profits like OpenAI, Inc. must make.”
Their next step “was to lock down the non-profit’s technology,” the suit continues.
“Obviously, the public would not pay for something that was open and free, so as detailed below, Defendants began withholding [its] scientific research and hoarding its technology.”
Musk accuses Altman of “deliberately” withholding information about his personal stakes in OpenAI and causing the nonprofit to “exclusively license its technology to Microsoft, the world’s largest for-profit corporation.”
Altman, OpenAI and Brockman stand accused of fraud and violations, breach of contract, and racketeering, among a slew of other charges.
Musk seeks “a constructive trust on Defendants’ ill-gotten gains, property, and assets traceable to Musk’s significant contributions to OpenAI” and “a judicial determination that OpenAI, Inc.’s license to Microsoft is null and void.”
It is worth noting that Musk himself has been accused of acting against users’ best interests, mostly concerning his takeover of Twitter, which he rebranded as X.
Despite his efforts to seem like a selfless martyr in the lawsuit, Musk does not have a squeaky-clean track record.
Users have accused him of turning X into a haven for racists and misogynists and offering them impunity.
This includes showing favoritism to certain accounts by reinstating them after violating. the platform’s terms of service
And allegations have only piled up against the embattled tech tycoon.
He was most recently accused of creating a political action committee called American PAC to undercut the democratic process in the 2024 presidential election.
The PAC allegedly ran ads on X that promised to register voters but actually harvested the information of users in swing states.
This triggered an investigation by the Michigan Secretary of State, with other states expected to follow suit.
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