Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, the nonprofit behind the development of ChatGPT, accusing CEO Sam Altman and other executives of setting the organization’s founding agreement “aflame” by focusing on profit.
In particular, Musk, whose role as one of the founders of the nonprofit in 2015 is detailed in the suit, is targeting OpenAI’s contracts with Microsoft, which he claims are counter to the original mission to create artificial intelligence programming to “for the benefit of humanity.”
“Although developed by OpenAI using contributions from [Musk] and others that were intended to benefit the public, GPT-4 is now a de facto Microsoft
proprietary algorithm, which it has integrated into its Office software suite,” states the suit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco. It also accuses Altman of engineering a “board coup” amid his tangled ouster and return to the company in November.
The suit launches a faceoff between Musk, the world’s richest man; Microsoft, one of the world’s largest companies, and Altman, the leader of the company most recognized for bringing artificial intelligence software to the mainstream.
Microsoft shares were unaffected in morning trading, dipping 79 cents to $412.85, in line with small moves in the broader market.
The suit details Musk’s involvement in the creation of OpenAI, at a time when it claims “Altman purported to share Mr. Musk’s concerns over the threat posed by AGI.” It quotes Altman as writing that the “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” in 2015.
Hence, as Google acquired DeepMind and “catapulted to the front of the race for
AGI,” Musk, Altman and OpenAI President Gregory Brockman joined forces to create “a non-profit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI, but it would be the opposite of Google.”
Instead, the founding agreement described an organization that would be a nonprofit working to benefit humanity rather than chasing gains for shareholders and would be “open source,” with all of the source code available to the public.
The suit notes the agreement was included in OpenAI’s incorporation papers. It states that Musk provided “a majority of its funding in its first several years, advising on research directions, and most importantly, recruiting some of the world’s leading scientists and engineers to work at the non-profit venture, including Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.” Recruiting, the suit says, was a “Herculean task” in competition with Google’s ability to “lavish compensation” on potential employees.
OpenAI’s initial research was open source, the suit continues, but soon after Altman became CEO in 2019, things began to change. In 2020, he inked a deal with Microsoft to exclusively license an early language model, though that technology was also made public. Microsoft has invested a reported $13 billion in the company, securing just under half the earnings of OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary for itself in return.
By March 2023, however, when OpenAI released its “its most powerful language model yet, GPT-4,” which the suit claims is “better at reasoning than average humans,” OpenAI was no longer making its research findings public.
Musk claims “this secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety.”
The suit also claims that Altman’s brief departure from the company in November “exploited Microsoft’s significant leverage over OpenAI, Inc. and forced the resignation of a majority of OpenAI, Inc.’s board members,” including Sutskever. The new, “hand-picked” board members “are ill equipped by design to make an independent determination of whether and when OpenAI has attained AGI—and hence when it has developed an algorithm that is outside the scope of Microsoft’s license,” the suit states.
Musk claims that Altman and company essentially turned the founding agreement “on its head” and that while OpenAI continues to claim that it is aiming to ensure that AI benefits humanity, it “has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
“Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an
AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.
Musk seeks to force the company to adhere to the founding agreement “and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world.” He also aims to have Altman to be required to give up any money he’s received as a result of the violations Musk alleges.
The suit comes a day after revelations that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Altman’s exit and return misled investors in the company.
OpenAI did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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