Elon Musk filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on Monday, just weeks after dropping a similar lawsuit against the company behind ChatGPT.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but later stepped down from the board due to differences over its direction, and in his California lawsuit he described his dispute with Altman and others as “a classic tale of altruism and greed.”
Musk’s lawyers allege that OpenAI and its executives “intentionally misled and deceived” Musk into providing more than $44 million in early stage funding to the startup.
The lawsuit alleges that Altman and his associates claimed to be developing advanced AI for the benefit of humanity, but ultimately abandoned that mission to benefit their own company and its major investor, Microsoft.
“After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time and tens of millions of dollars of seed capital, and recruited some of the top AI scientists to OpenAI, Musk and the nonprofit’s eponymous purpose were betrayed by Altman and his co-defendants,” the lawsuit states.
“The dishonesty and deceit are on a Shakespearean scale.”
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI, Altman and Brockman of fraud and breach of contract. Musk is seeking various forms of relief, including damages, return of profits related to his investment, and a court order blocking OpenAI’s licensing agreement with Microsoft, which has invested approximately $13 billion in the company.
Lawyers for Tesla and X’s chief executives also demanded a jury trial.
The Washington Post has reached out to OpenAI and Microsoft for comment on the lawsuit.
In a previous blog post In response to Musk’s initial lawsuit, OpenAI denied his allegations and said it would move to dismiss the claims.
“When discussing a commercial entity to further the mission, Elon expressed a preference for either a merger with Tesla or for him to take full control,” the blog post read. “Elon left OpenAI, stating that he wanted a competitor to rival Google and DeepMind and that he would create that himself.”
Musk filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and its leaders in March of last year, but dropped it months later, just before a judge was due to decide whether to allow the case to proceed.
The billionaire founded his own company, xAI, a direct rival to OpenAI, which raised $6 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $24 billion.
