In a legal move that surprised everyone except perhaps those who have been following Elon Musk’s relationship with OpenAI like a daytime soap opera, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has filed a lawsuit claiming that OpenAI, a company he helped found, has rather abandoned the whole “open” part of its name in favor of something a little more “closed and lucrative.”
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, accuses OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of breaching their founding agreement by turning the nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization into what Musk alleges is now something suspiciously resembling a for-profit tech giant wearing a nonprofit Halloween costume.
At the crux of Musk’s grievance is OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, reportedly involving funding north of $10 billion and access to the crown jewels of AI: the GPT models. Musk’s legal team claims this partnership effectively transformed OpenAI into a “de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft, thereby betraying its original mission of ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity rather than just boosting Redmond’s quarterly earnings.
In case the irony was not rich enough already, Musk’s lawsuit references internal correspondence and board deliberations that, in his view, reveal a slow but steady descent from idealism into Silicon Valley pragmatism. Or as Musk might put it on Twitter, an “AI coup.”
OpenAI, for its part, has not yet publicly responded to the case. Presumably, it is still parsing the legal document through GPT-4 while preparing a carefully worded blog post that says everything and nothing at once.
Musk has a long-standing and complicated relationship with OpenAI. He co-founded the company in 2015, then departed the board in 2018, reportedly due to conflicts of interest and, perhaps, a touch of philosophical divergence. Since then, his opinion of the company has cooled from enthusiastic parent to stern ex with trust issues.
In a delightful twist of corporate drama, Musk is also working on his own AI startup, xAI, which promises to compete with OpenAI by doing precisely what he says OpenAI no longer does. With names like Grok allegedly on the table, it seems the naming strategy is less “artificial intelligence” and more “Douglas Adams meets VC pitch deck.”
Legal scholars are already weighing in on the unusual case, noting that enforcing a “founding mission” can be as tricky as enforcing a New Year’s resolution. Especially when billions of dollars and the future of human-machine relations are on the line.
If nothing else, this lawsuit forces an existential question: when is “open” still “open” and when has it been repackaged and sold with a proprietary ribbon?
Turns out even AI might need a prenup.