Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, OpenAI for abandoning ‘benefit of humanity’ mission for profit

Musk accused the defendants of breaching their contract and engaging in unfair business practices. He called on them to make good on their original commitment to keep things open source, and requested an injunction to prevent OpenAI and Microsoft from profiting off the innovations. The company set out originally to a non-profit enterprise.

"OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft," Musk lamented in the suit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court. "Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity."

Musk explained that at OpenAI's founding in 2015, it was agreed upon that it would "serve as a vital counterbalance to, Google/DeepMind in the race for AGI, but would do so to benefit humanity, not the shareholders of a private, for-profit company."

The Tesla CEO named the company OpenAI because it was always intended to be "open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations," a company that "would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons."

Musk said that the release of GPT-4 in 2023 was then Altman "caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public."

GPT-4's internal design, he explained, was "kept and remains a complete secret except to OpenAI—and, on information and belief, Microsoft."

"There are no scientific publications describing the design of GPT-4," he added. "Instead, there are just press releases bragging about performance. On information and belief, this secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety. Although developed by OpenAI using contributions from Plaintiff and others that were intended to benefit the public, GPT-4 is now a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm, which it has integrated into its Office software suite."

Musk also drew attention to the makeup of the company's executive, noting that, "OpenAI, Inc.'s once carefully crafted non-profit structure was replaced by a purely profit-driven CEO and a Board with inferior technical expertise in AGI and AI public policy," claiming that, "the board now has an observer seat reserved solely for Microsoft."