Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its founders Monday, alleging the tech company has betrayed its principles.
In the Monday suit, Mr. Musk claims that OpenAI has strayed wildly from its founding agreement by moving away from a nonprofit structure and partnering with tech giant Microsoft.
Mr. Musk said OpenAI’s founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, tricked him into helping start the company in 2015 by convincing him that the company would work for the “benefit of humanity” and not shareholder value.
According to Mr. Musk, the company’s leadership betrayed him with its partnership with Microsoft.
“The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the suit reads.
Monday’s suit comes two months after Mr. Musk withdrew an almost identical lawsuit against OpenAI and its founders. Earlier this year, Mr. Musk sued the company for breaching its founding agreement and intentionally misleading him into investing in OpenAI.
The suit sparked a months-long legal battle between OpenAI and Mr. Musk, in which the company revealed his internal emails showing he had the idea of moving the company away from its nonprofit origins.
According to a blog post published in March, Mr. Musk was instrumental in moving OpenAI toward a more profit-oriented company. However, once he was refused majority equity, board control and a CEO position, a rift formed among the founders.
“We couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI,” the post reads. “Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0 and that he planned to build an [artificial general intelligence] competitor within Tesla.”
When Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018, the company had a market valuation of around $1 billion. Since then, the company has exploded in popularity, with a current market value of around $30 billion.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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