Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT as he argues that the institution has breached the principles he agreed on when he helped it being found back in 2015. The lawsuit has also been filed against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman which states that the firm has departed from its non-profit and open-source mission, as it was when it was founded. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI is focused on “maximizing profits” for its major investor Microsoft instead of focusing on benefiting humanity as it was set up to do. The company was created to build artificial general intelligence (AGI)- an AI that can perform any task that a human mind is capable of. At first, it was also set up to be a non-profit organization, which means the company would not aim to make money out of its services.
In the lawsuit, it is mentioned that under these agreements, Musk has agreed to work on founding OpenAI, along with Sam Altman, and co-founder Greg Brockman. However, Musk left three years later. “This case is filed to compel OpenAI 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,” the lawsuit further states. The filing was done after it was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that US regulators had started to investigate the ChatGPT creator, thinking whether the investors had been misled. The probe started after the boardroom tension at the company in November 2023. In the incident, Mr. Altman was suddenly expelled from the board, before being reinstated several days later.
The board at that time accused the CEO of not being “consistently candid in his communications”. This made the board lose confidence in Altman’s leadership. It was a row where Microsoft became deeply involved with the company- including becoming a major investor and taking any staff who wanted to quit OpenAI. Musk shared his concern over the situation on X- formerly Twitter, saying that he is “very worried”. His new lawsuit now states that these “stunning developments” expose Microsoft’s increased influence over OpenAI. “Its technology, including GPT-4, is closed-source primarily to serve the proprietary commercial interests of Microsoft,” the lawsuit claims.
Microsoft has invested a massive amount of $1bn in OpenAI back in 2019. His backing came shortly after the once-founded non-profit organization suddenly declared that it was open to a new “capped profit” structure, allowing investors to make considerable investments. Microsoft’s investment expanded to a multi-billion and a multi-year partnership in 2023 when OpenAI launched a chatbot, ChatGPT. This investment and partnership is now being inspected by UK, EU, and US regulators.
To understand the lawsuit it is important to grasp that if OpenAI was founded with being a non-profit at its core, then the firm’s senior figures including Musk were right to be disgruntled. Especially after Saltman was dramatically fired from the board and there were whispers about the growing potential of the firm’s profit-making division.
