Elon Musk moves court against OpenAI again; Sam Altman and Greg Brockman sued: previous case ‘lacked teeth’, says lawyer

Billionaire Elon Musk revived a lawsuit against OpenAI, giving rise to the six-year-old dispute that started with a power struggle at the San Francisco-based start-up, reported the New York Times on Monday, August 5.

The new lawsuit, filed on Monday in a Northern Californian federal court, claimed that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, broke the company’s contract, which puts commercial interest ahead of the public good. This is similar to the claim of the original lawsuit, as per the report.

Elon Musk withdrew his original lawsuit seven weeks ago. This move came without any explanation from Musk before the judge was about to give a verdict.

Sam Altman and Brockman created OpenAI with Elon Musk in 2015 and promised to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, as per the lawsuit. Then, allegedly, both the founders deserted the mission when the firm entered a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, according to the report.

Musk was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices,” said the lawsuit. Open AI did not immediately respond to the New York Times’ request for comments.

Altman responded to Musk’s original lawsuit by saying that they intended to ask that its claims be dismissed and the company aims to cater to the public good by developing an artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) machine capable of doing anything that the human brain is capable of, as per the report.

“The mission of OpenAI is to ensure A.G.I. benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial A.G.I. and helping create broadly distributed benefits,” they said.

Musk separated his ties with OpenAI in 2018 after a power struggle in the company, which was created with a vision to freely share artificial intelligence technology with the public, as it was too dangerous to be controlled by a single entity like Google, according to the report. Open AI was converted into a for-profit company and it also raised $13 billion from tech giant Microsoft.

The OpenAI board fired Sam Altman in November 2023, stating that the founder could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission of building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. According to the report, he returned to the company after five days.

Musk sued OpenAI two months after that incident. The new case alleges that the two founders have misled Musk when they created OpenAI, according to the report.

“Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism over greed,” said the lawsuit. “Altman, in concert with other defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by AI,” said the lawsuit quoted in the news report.

Musk filed the new lawsuit on Monday as OpenAI allegedly violated federal racketeering laws by conspiring against Musk to defraud him, the New York Times quoted Marc Toberoff, Musk’s lawyer, as saying.

“The previous suit lacked teeth — and I don’t believe in the tooth fairy,” said Toberoff. “This is a much more forceful lawsuit,” he said as per the report.

As per the lawsuit, OpenAI’s contract with Microsoft states that the company will not have any rights over OpenAI’s technology once the lab has achieved A.G.I., according to the report. The lawsuit also questioned whether or not the A.G.I has been achieved to determine whether the Microsoft contract should be voided or not, said the report.

OpenAI is worth more than $80 billion, according to the company’s latest funding round. Industry experts also say that OpenAI’s current technology is not A.G.I. and that the scientists do not know how to build such a system, as per the report.