Musk sues OpenAI in renewed claims it ‘put profits before benefit of humanity’

Elon Musk is taking legal action against OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, renewing claims that the ChatGPT-maker betrayed its founding aims of benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits.

The complaint, filed in a Northern California federal court, called Mr Musk’s case a “textbook tale of altruism versus greed”.

Mr Altman and others named in the suit “intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence”, according to the complaint.

Mr Musk was an early investor in OpenAI when it was founded in 2015 and co-chaired its board alongside Mr Altman.

In the complaint, he said he invested “tens of millions” of dollars and recruited top AI research scientists for OpenAI.

Mr Musk resigned from the board in early 2018 in a move that OpenAI said at the time would prevent conflicts of interest as he was recruiting AI talent to build self-driving technology at the electric car maker.

The Tesla chief executive dropped his previous complaint against OpenAI without explanation in June.

It alleged that when Mr Musk bankrolled OpenAI’s creation, he secured an agreement with Mr Altman and Mr Brockman to keep the AI company as a non-profit that would develop technology for the benefit of the public and keep its code open.

“As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said in an emailed statement.

In March, OpenAI released emails from Mr Musk showing his earlier support for making it a for-profit company.

Mr Musk claims in the new complaint that he and OpenAI’s namesake objective were “betrayed by Altman and his accomplices”.

“The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the complaint added.