Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public good. Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.
“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology. The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and accuses OpenAI and Mr. Altman of breaching contract, violating fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking for OpenAI to make its technology open source and for Mr. Altman to repay earnings from this behavior.
The lawsuit is a fresh challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as OpenAI’s chief executive last year before regaining control of the company. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States and Europe. The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley.
