We started again. There is Elon Musk filed another lawsuit against OpenAI and the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, two months after the withdrawal previous. Musk again argues that OpenAI has violated its founding obligations by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
However, this time the suit was filed in federal court rather than state court. The new filing alleges OpenAI violated federal racketeering laws by conspiring to defraud Musk, according to his attorney Mark Toberoff. “The previous suit had no teeth — and I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” Toberoff said The New York Times. “It’s a stronger case.”
The latest lawsuit alleges that Altman and fellow OpenAI founder Greg Brockman deliberately misled Musk when the trio (and others) founded the company. Altman and Brockman allegedly reneged on their promise to open source their OpenAI technology instead of granting an exclusive license to Microsoft. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary and owns a 49 percent stake (FTC said he was investigating those business deals).
In addition, Musk asked the court to determine whether OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence (AI), a form of AI equivalent to the human brain. Altman said in January that AGI could be developed in the “reasonably near future.”
According to the lawsuit, Microsoft’s contract with OpenAI states that once the latter reaches AGI, it will no longer be able to use the company’s technology. If OpenAI has reached AGI in the eyes of the court, its contract with Microsoft should be declared null and void, according to the petition.
Musk filed his original lawsuit in February. He took it back in Junea day earlier, a judge was supposed to rule on OpenAI’s request to dismiss it, but didn’t give a reason to do so.
In response to the original suit, alleged “inappropriate” OpenAI says it aims to serve the public good by creating AGI. He claims that he needs more resources to do this than he originally thought. The company added that it (and Musk) agreed that a for-profit arm was required to raise sufficient resources. However, according to OpenAI, the parties disagreed on how to do this. The company said Musk wanted full control OpenAI will merge with Tesla. Musk eventually left OpenAI and eventually went on to start his own AI company. xAI.
