Elon Musk renews legal war on OpenAI, two months after dropping lawsuit

Elon Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 but parted ways with the project a few years later. Photo / Getty Images

Elon Musk filed a new lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Monday, accusing the company’s executives of tricking him and other investors into supporting a company aimed at bettering humanity but then pivoting to become a for-profit enterprise.

The lawsuit comes nearly two months after Musk dropped a previous lawsuit making the same accusations a day before a judge was set to rule on its merits.

OpenAI executives responded to that initial lawsuit by accusing Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 but parted ways with the project a few years later after disagreements about strategy, of being upset at missing out on the company’s recent success.

OpenAI posted emails it said Musk sent in 2018 suggesting that OpenAI should become part of Tesla to give it a way to compete with bigger companies.

The new suit was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California and names OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman as defendants in addition to the company itself.

“As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” said Kayla Wood, a spokeswoman for OpenAI.

The suit adds to OpenAI’s growing legal headaches.

The company faces numerous lawsuits from authors and newspapers who allege it took their content to train artificial intelligence systems without permission or offering appropriate compensation.

Government agencies in the United States, UK and Europe are running probes into whether the company violated competition, securities and consumer protection laws. The company has hired lawyers and lobbyists at a rapid clip.

When Musk and others created OpenAI in 2015, it was a nonprofit positioned as a counterweight to Google, Microsoft and Facebook’s dominance of cutting-edge AI research.

Musk officially stepped down in 2018, citing conflicts with AI projects at the automaker Tesla where he is CEO, and has invested in his own AI initiatives. Last year he launched a venture called X.AI that he said would compete with OpenAI and its blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT.

In 2019, OpenAI started a for-profit subsidiary that took investment from Microsoft and others. Altman has said the start-up had to take outside funding to keep up with big tech’s huge investment in AI.

The strategy has largely paid off, with OpenAI using the investment to train massive new AI models, which led to ChatGPT, kicking off an AI arms race in the tech industry. OpenAI was seen as pioneering the next phase of the AI industry.

In the new lawsuit, Musk accuses Altman of running a “long con” and alleges that the initial nonprofit character of OpenAI was a sham to get his time and money.

“The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the suit.

Written by: Gerrit De Vynck

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