Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, among others, alleging a breach of contractual agreements established when he assisted in founding the ChatGPT-maker back in 2015. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in San Francisco, claims that Altman and OpenAI’s co-founder, Greg Brockman, initially approached Musk to establish an open-source, non-profit organization aimed at developing artificial intelligence technology for the betterment of humanity.
According to Musk’s lawyers, the focus on profit-seeking by the Microsoft-backed company violates the terms of the original agreement.
As of the time of filing this report, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Elon Musk had not yet responded to requests for comment from Reuters.
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. Apart from his involvement with OpenAI, Musk also leads the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, has become the fastest-growing software application globally within six months. Its popularity has led to the emergence of rival chatbots from tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet, as well as numerous startups that capitalized on the hype to secure substantial funding.
ChatGPT has found application across various industries, from summarizing documents to writing computer code, triggering a competition among Big Tech companies to introduce their own generative AI-based offerings.
