Elon Musk Files Amended Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Sam Altman

Elon Musk sued OpenAI earlier this year, alleging that the company broke its founding agreement and is working to maximize profits for Microsoft instead of humanity, as a whole.

Though Musk withdrew the lawsuit in June, he later revived it in August — and now he’s expanding the complaint to include Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, and Microsoft vice president of partnerships and operations Deannah Templeton as defendants. They join original defendants OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and its president Greg Brockman.

The 107-page complaint was filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

In it, Musk accuses OpenAI of going from a “tax-exempt charity” to a “for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon.”

^{Elon Musk. Photo Credit: Allison Robbert/AFP/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Musk alleges in the complaint that he “nurtured” OpenAI “in its infancy” with his “money, advice, recruiting efforts and connections.”

Musk says he played a part in OpenAI’s origin story by recruiting key executives, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and putting more than $44 million in cash behind the company. Musk was involved in OpenAI from its founding in December 2015 to his resignation from the board in February 2018.

Related: Elon Musk Sues ChatGPT-Maker OpenAI

“It is fair to say that without Musk’s involvement, backing, and substantial supportive efforts, there would have been no OpenAI,” the lawsuit states. OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 in a move that kickstarted the AI boom. ChatGPT had more than 200 million weekly users as of August and was worth $157 billion as of October.

The complaint accuses OpenAI of now transforming into a for-profit arm of Microsoft and actively trying to eliminate competitors like Musk’s xAI by making investors promise not to fund them. xAI raised $6 billion in May and is in talks to raise $6 billion more.

Musk brings this legal action against OpenAI to “divest Defendants of their ill-gotten gains and ensure OpenAI maintains its namesake mission to develop safe and open AI for the public good.”

The updated lawsuit adds xAI as a plaintiff, along with Shivon Zilis, who is an executive at Musk’s Neuralink, a former OpenAI board member, and the mother of three of Musk’s twelve children. Musk is still listed as a plaintiff too.

Musk is the richest person in the world at the time of writing, with a net worth of $307 billion.

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