Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Elon Musk is suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, among others, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
In a lawsuit filed on Thursday with a San Francisco court, Musk’s lawyers said the tech billionaire was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and agreed to form a non-profit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”
A co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, Musk stepped down from the firm’s board in 2018, four years after saying that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” the lawsuit filing said.
Musk’s lawyers said in the lawsuit that OpenAI’s focus on maximizing profits for Microsoft breaks that agreement.
“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,” the filing said.
OpenAI and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment.
Musk’s lawyers said the suit was submitted “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 legal action pits two of the world’s most prominent tech leaders against each other at a time of extraordinary hype over the future of AI.
Since debuting in Nov. 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. The AI tool quickly became the
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