Elon Musk says in a Thursday lawsuit that Sam Altman and OpenAI have betrayed an agreement from the artificial intelligence research company's founding to develop the technology for the benefit of humanity rather than profit.
In the suit filed Thursday night in San Francisco Superior Court, Musk claims OpenAI's recent relationship with tech giant Microsoft has compromised the company's original dedication to public, open-source artificial general intelligence.
"OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity," Musk says in the suit.
Musk brings claims including breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices against OpenAI and asks for the company to revert back to open source. Musk also requests an injunction to prevent OpenAI, its president Gregory Brockman and its CEO Sam Altman — named as co-defendants in the case — as well as Microsoft, from profiting off of the company's artificial general intelligence technology.
Artificial general intelligence, a type of AI developed to autonomously perform on the cognitive level of humans, has been OpenAI's main goal and is demonstrated, Musk says, in its GPT-4. The company released GPT-4 in March 2023, but according to Musk, it remains a closed model, in contrast to previous iterations — a move driven by commercial considerations rather than in the interest of humanity.
