Tesla CEO Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in U.S. federal court. In the lawsuit, Musk claims that OpenAI’s actions violate his rights and interests and that he was misled when OpenAI was founded.
Image source: Mariia Shalabaieva/Unsplash
At the core of Musk’s claims is his belief that Altman and current OpenAI president Greg Brockman deceived him into co-founding an artificial intelligence company on the basis that it would be a non-profit.
The lawsuit alleges that after Musk joined the project and invested millions of dollars, he was “betrayed by Altman and his (Microsoft) allies,” who “created an opaque network of for-profit OpenAI affiliates engaged in unbridled self-enrichment.” “The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the lawsuit says.
Interestingly, the claims in the new lawsuit are similar to another lawsuit Musk recently filed against OpenAI and Altman in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO eventually dropped. Musk expressed concerns about the development of artificial intelligence and its potential threats to humanity, and claimed that OpenAI, since moving into the commercial sphere, has strayed from its original goals and principles, which, in his opinion, jeopardizes the safety and ethics of AI technologies. “OpenAI no longer adheres to the principles that were laid out when it was founded,” Musk said, indicating that the organization’s commercial interests prevail over public ones.
The lawsuit also alleges that Microsoft was complicit in the situation. By referring to OpenAI as a nonprofit without shareholders, Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company, “sought to gain leverage in other ways, including by encouraging OpenAI to use and become one with its Azure cloud computing system.”
While Musk has expressed affection for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the company’s values and those of OpenAI do not align, the lawsuit says.
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