Elon Musk Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman For Making Money From Benefiting Humanity

Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman and OpenAI of seeking profit over the betterment of humanity in a new breach of contract lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court yesterday, February 29.

Musk helped Altman found OpenA as a nonprofit in 2015 (Musk stepped down from the board in 2018 and no longer has a stake). Central to the lawsuit is OpenAI's “founding agreement,” which, according to the suit, stated that the lab would build artificial general intelligence (AGI) “for the benefit of humanity,” not to “maximize shareholder profits,” and that the technology would be “open source” and not kept “secret for commercial reasons”.

Musk's new lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has reversed course on that deal, particularly through its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. It further points to the secrecy shrouding the technology behind OpenAI's iconic GPT-4 Chat language model and significant changes to the company's board following Altman's tumultuous hiring and re-firing last year.

“These 2023 events constitute egregious violations of the Founding Agreement, which the defendants have effectively subverted,” the lawsuit states. “Until today, the website of OpenAI, Inc. it goes on to state that its statutory purpose is to ensure that AGI “benefits all mankind”. In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been converted to closed source in fact subsidiary of the world's largest technology company: Microsoft.”

Along with Altman and OpenAI, the suit names another co-founder, Greg Brockman, as a defendant, as well as several OpenAI subsidiaries. A representative for OpenAI did not immediately return calls Rolling rockhis request for comment.

Microsoft, while not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, is mentioned several times in the lawsuit. He states, at one point, that the company “stands to make a fortune selling GPT-4 to the public, which would not be possible if OpenAI – as required – makes the technology freely available to the public.”

Regarding Altman's firing and rehiring last year, the lawsuit notes various news reports indicating that OpenAI's old board ousted Altman over concerns about the company's new focus on profit and the speed with which it developed new its technologies. (While OpenAI began as a nonprofit organization, it launched a for-profit wing in 2019.) Much of that board began once Altman returned, and the lawsuit suggests that he “picked” a new board with little “technical experience or any meaningful background in governance of artificial intelligence, which the previous board had designed.

Instead, the suit says, the new board included members “with more experience in business or profit-centered politics than in AI ethics and governance. They were also “big Altman fans.”

Musk's lawsuit is reportedly aimed at forcing OpenAI to return its profits, though the lawsuit appears to want any damages proven at trial to go to a “non-profit or charitable cause” (while also covering attorneys' fees , of course). Beyond the money, however, the suit says Musk brought it to “force OpenAI to honor the Founding Agreement and return to its mission of developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”