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The founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, has filed a lawsuit accusing high-profile artificial intelligence company OpenAI of betraying its non-profit mission and has headed to trial with jury selection scheduled for Monday.
The world’s richest person is taking on an AI startup he used to support but now competes with in the fast-growing tech sector. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a formidable rival to Grok, made by Musk’s xAI lab.
Court filings show that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman convinced Musk to back the lab in 2015 as a co-founder for a non-profit whose technology “would belong to the world.” Musk pumped in millions but later left. OpenAI later created a commercial arm, arguing it needed hundreds of billions of dollars for data centres. Microsoft has also poured billions into the startup.
Musk argues he was deceived about OpenAI’s charitable mission, while OpenAI countered that the breakup was about “Elon generating more power and more money.” In a recent X post, the company said: “His lawsuit remains nothing more than a harassment campaign that’s driven by ego, jealousy and a desire to slow down a competitor.”
The judge will decide by mid-May, based on the advisory jury’s findings, whether OpenAI broke a promise to Musk. Along with forcing OpenAI back to a pure non-profit, Musk’s suit urges the Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman. Musk has renounced personal damages, pledging to redirect any award to the OpenAI non-profit.
Musk stripped Twitter of its trust-and-safety functions after purchasing it, and now he must convince a jury that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was created on false promise.
