Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, accusing him of betraying OpenAI's mission of benefiting humanity
Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming the company's partnership with Microsoft threatens its original non-profit mission.
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- Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.
- Musk accused the company's partnership with Microsoft of jeopardizing its non-profit mission.
- The Tesla CEO was a cofounder of OpenAI in late 2015 but later left.
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming that the ChatGPT maker's partnership with Microsoft is jeopardizing its original non-profit mission.
"OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft," lawyers for Musk argued.
They added: "Under its new board, it is not just developing but is refining an AGI to maximise profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity."
The lawsuit, filed Thursday, also named OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman. The lawyers claimed that its pivot to a "capped-profit" division breaches the contract of its being an open-source, non-profit company as it was first established in late 2015.
It was founded by Altman, Musk and Brockman in December 2015 as a non-profit research lab. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.
The lawyers also argued that OpenAI kept GPT-4 "a complete secret" and that AGI "poses a particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity" when in the hands of a for-profit company such as Google.
Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, and made its first contribution in 2019.
In January Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he doesn't have any issues with OpenAI's ownership structure and just wants the ChatGPT maker to have "good governance" rather than control of the company.
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