Elon Musk has sued OpenAI, renewing claims that the ChatGPT-maker put profits before 'the benefit of humanity'.
ADVERTISEMENTElon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and two of its co-founders with renewed claims that the AI company behind ChatGPT betrayed its founding aims of benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others named in the suit “intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence,” according to the complaint.
Musk was an early investor in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015.
He co-chaired its board alongside Altman, invested “tens of millions” of dollars, according to the lawsuit, and recruited top AI research scientists for OpenAI.
Musk resigned from the board in early 2018 in a move that OpenAI said at the time would prevent conflicts of interest as he was recruiting AI talent to build self-driving technology at Tesla.
Musk dropped his previous lawsuit against OpenAI without explanation in June.
That lawsuit alleged that when Musk bankrolled OpenAI’s creation, he secured an agreement with Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman to keep the AI company as a nonprofit that would develop technology for the benefit of the public and keep its code open.
“As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said in an emailed statement.
In March, OpenAI released emails from Musk showing his earlier support for making it a for-profit company.
Musk claims in the new suit that he and OpenAI's namesake objective were “betrayed by Altman and his accomplices.”
“The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the complaint said.
