Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for violating company principles

Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for breach of contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over the public interest.

Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar venture with Microsoft is reneging on a promise to carefully develop AI and make the technology publicly available.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in an ongoing battle between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018, the company became a leader in generative AI and created ChatGPT, which can produce text and respond to questions in human prose. Mr Musk, who has his own AI company called xAI, said OpenAI is not focused enough on the technology’s existential risk to humanity.

Mr Musk’s lawsuit states that OpenAI was established as a non-profit organization to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of mankind”. A key part of that, the lawsuit said, was to make the technology open source, meaning the underlying software code would be shared with the world. Instead, the company has created a for-profit business and restricted access to its technology.

OpenAI and Mr Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit is a new challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as CEO of OpenAI last year before regaining control of the company. In addition to Mr. Altman, the lawsuit also names Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, as a defendant.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement over news content used to train the chatbots.