- OpenAI has fired back at Elon Musk’s latest lawsuit.
- The startup accused the billionaire of harassing the company for “his own competitive advantage.”
- Musk’s lawyers have argued that OpenAI executives “deceived” him into cofounding the company.
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OpenAI has hit back at Elon Musk amid a legal fight between the startup and its estranged cofounder, accusing the billionaire of harassment.
In August, Musk sued OpenAI for the second time this year, arguing that executives at the AI company had “deceived” him into cofounding the lab by playing on his concerns about existential risks from AI.
The Tesla CEO’s lawyers called OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit structure to a “capped-profit” structure a “textbook tale of altruism versus greed.”
Musk cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit AI lab in 2015 with CEO Sam Altman and nine others. He later resigned from the company’s board of directors in 2018, a year before the company announced its for-profit arm.
In response to Musk’s lawsuit, OpenAI called it the latest move in Musk’s “increasingly blusterous campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage.”
“OpenAI is dedicated to the safe and beneficial development of artificial general intelligence (“AGI”),” OpenAI’s lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday. “Musk once supported OpenAI in that mission but abandoned the venture when his bid to dominate it failed.”
The filing added: “Since launching a competing artificial intelligence company, xAI, Musk has been trying to leverage the judicial system for an edge.”
OpenAI asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that Musk failed to offer factual or “legal scaffolding needed to sustain his claims.”
Representatives for Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
A long-running feud
In March, Musk first sued OpenAI on similar grounds but later dropped the suit in June.
The billionaire has publicly criticized OpenAI’s fundraising and products sold through its for-profit arm, sharing memes and critical posts about the AI company via his social media platform, X.
He’s also criticized the company’s close partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI’s flagship product, ChatGPT.
Musk also took issue with OpenAI’s recent historic funding round.
In October, OpenAI completed a funding round of $6.6 billion, valuing it at $157 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
Musk later weighed in on the funding round in a post on X, sharing a report that OpenAI had asked investors for an exclusive funding agreement in which they would refrain from backing five of its competitors and calling the company “evil.”
Musk’s xAI was reportedly among the list of five competitors, along with Perplexity, Glean, Anthropic, and Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence.
OpenAI is reportedly moving further away from its nonprofit roots with plans to restructure to become a for-profit benefit corporation.
It’s the latest development during a tumultuous period for the company that has seen several key executives part ways, including prominent figures like Mira Muta, the company’s former CTO, and cofounder Ilya Sutskever.