San Francisco: Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Musk accused them of abandoning the company’s founding mission to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI), “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
In the legal case filed with a San Francisco court, Musk’s attorneys noted that the tech billionaire was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to form a non-profit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”
“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world, Microsoft,” the lawsuit filing stated.
Musk’s lawyers in the suit alleged that OpenAI’s focus on increasing profits for Microsoft violated their contract. The filing said that, “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.”
Attorneys for Musk remarked that “The lawsuit was submitted to compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world.”
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI and resigned from the firm’s board in 2018, four years after warning that AI could be “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”