His goal is to have the company’s multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft declared void, according to court documents published on Monday. In June, he dropped the lawsuit without giving any reasons.
Musk accuses OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman of ignoring the original purpose of the project. It was intended to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for the benefit of humanity and not to pursue profit.
OpenAI rejects allegations
OpenAI denies the allegations. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research and development organization. To attract external investors, it founded a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. By that time, Musk had already separated from OpenAI amid a dispute.
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft pumped 10 billion dollars (currently 9.2 billion euros) into the commercial arm of OpenAI. According to its own statements, the software group did not secure any shares, but only a share of the profits. The antitrust authorities in the USA and Europe are also taking a closer look at this deal.
Daum goes into detail
In the first lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI in February of violating the founding agreement. The company, which he co-founded in 2015, had strayed from the agreed path of being a non-profit company whose research into artificial intelligence should benefit humanity, Musk argued.
OpenAI countered, among other things, that there was no formal founding agreement that could have been violated. Musk then backed out shortly before the first hearing on the case. US experts had given his lawsuit little chance of success.
Conspiracy to defraud?
Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff told the New York Times that the previous lawsuit was toothless and the new one is much stronger. Essentially, the accusation is that there was a conspiracy to defraud Musk.
A year ago, the AI chatbot ChatGPT triggered an unprecedented hype about artificial intelligence – with expectations ranging from almost unlimited possibilities in the digital world to the fear of the extinction of humanity. Such AI chatbots are trained with huge amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind them is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue.