Elon Musk files new lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman after dropping a similar suit earlier this year.

The new lawsuit, filed in a Californian federal court under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, is substantially longer with 15 charges instead of the 5 in the original suit.

The new complaint again alleges that OpenAI’s pursuit of profit breaches the contract Musk, Altman, and Brockman had when founding the company. Musk’s new legal team now also claims that Musk was intentionally misled into supporting the venture.

The filing’s preamble states, “Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism versus greed. Altman, in concert with other Defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence.”

Musk says that Altman sold him the idea of a non-profit AI company that would attract top scientists who shared his vision of sharing the technology for the benefit of humanity. Allegedly Altman told Musk OpenAI would be “a meaningful counterweight to Google’s DeepMind in the race for Artificial General Intelligence.”

When Microsoft became OpenAI’s biggest investor and OpenAI sought to profit from its closed proprietary AI models Musk says it was clear that he’d been duped.

After investing tens of millions of dollars and significant time, and recruiting top scientists for OpenAI, the lawsuit says, “Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.”

The lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s pursuit of profit has led to the company achieving a $100B valuation and Musk intends to “divest Defendants of their ill-gotten gains.”

As background for the lawsuit, the filing says that Musk has long been concerned about the existential threat AI poses to humanity while companies like OpenAI and Google “see it as a source of even greater profit and power.”

The lawsuit offers an insight into the early conversations between Musk and Altman. It quotes Altman’s proposal to “structure it so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works. Obviously we’d comply with/aggressively support all regulation.”

Musk says these early discussions constitute a contract that was not honored. Whether Altman’s discussions and emails were a contract is a legal question. The allegation that OpenAI has pursued profits and hasn’t open-sourced its AI is harder to dismiss.

OpenAI has had a tough week for other reasons. Product leader Peter Deng has left the company as has OpenAI co-founder John Schulman who has joined Anthropic to pursue AI alignment. Greg Brockman has also reportedly taken an extended leave of absence.

That leaves Altman at the helm of one of the world’s most powerful AI companies, and Musk says he’s more interested in money than the safety of humanity.

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