Elon Musk has named Microsoft and other stakeholders in his ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI. According to court documents, Musk claims that OpenAI tried to implement a cryptocurrency in 2018, but he opposed the proposal.
OpenAI representatives have released years of correspondence with Mr. Musk, demonstrating that he was well aware of their struggles to fund research that requires huge sums of money.
Elon Musk and OpenAI go head to head
In a recent court filing, Elon Musk has named several new defendants in his ongoing lawsuit against the prominent artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Musk names former OpenAI partners and investors in the amended lawsuit, including Microsoft. He accuses the company of abandoning its non-profit commitment, a key reason Musk invested in the first place.
Plaintiffs and allegations in Musk's lawsuit. Source: CourtListener
Since abandoning its nonprofit status, OpenAI has publicly sought to achieve a valuation of $150 billion, an astonishing figure for any company, even one with ambitions to disrupt the entire tech industry.
Furthermore, according to court documents provided by Musk's legal team, OpenAI attempted to launch an ICO in 2018:
“In January 2018, just months after expressing ‘interest’ in September 2017, Altman proposed a fraudulent ‘ICO,’ or initial coin offering, in which OpenAI, Inc. would sell its own cryptocurrency. Musk also dismissed the idea, saying ‘it would only result in a major loss of credibility for OpenAI and everyone involved in the ICO,’” according to Musk’s team.
In other words, Musk’s lawyers argue that OpenAI founder Sam Altman has always prioritized making money over serving the public good. Musk claims he joined the project with the goal of running it as a nonprofit and then left because of ideological differences. The company has generated massive revenue since going public, receiving $6.6 billion in funding last October.
The company, however, has steadfastly denied the allegations. This March, it released a ream of communications between Musk and company executives spanning nearly nine years.
In these discussions, OpenAI members emphasized the capital-intensive nature of developing artificial intelligence and claimed that a shift to profit was “inevitable.” In other words, Musk has known this for years.
“We feel sorry that it has come to this for someone we deeply admired — someone who inspired us to dream higher, then told us we would fail, start a competitor, and then sued us when we began making significant progress toward OpenAI's mission without him,” the company said in a statement.
So far, the case’s prospects for success are dim. Musk dropped the case in July, before reopening it and naming new plaintiffs. The move may have been intended to inconvenience OpenAI rather than win a large settlement or significantly change the company’s business direction.
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