“As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” said Kayla Wood, a spokeswoman for OpenAI.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
(c) 2024 , The Washington Post
