Elon Musk Attacks Microsoft in Amended OpenAI Lawsuit

Elon Musk has updated his fraud, breach of contract and racketeering lawsuit against OpenAI to bring antitrust claims against Microsoft, accusing both companies of trying to “monopolize the generative artificial intelligence market.” Corrected complaint filed Thursday names Microsoft as a novel defendant, as well as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Microsoft vice president Dee Templeton, a former OpenAI board member.

As of 2019, Microsoft has invested $14 billion in OpenAI and holds exclusive rights to commercially license the startup’s AI technology and a 49% stake in its for-profit subsidiary. Musk’s lawyers claim that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “engaged in a crazy deal” to create a “de facto merger” of the two companies to promote anti-competitive practices.

The lawsuit argues that OpenAI and Microsoft are “actively trying to eliminate competitors” by exchanging “sensitive competitive information” and forcing investors to refrain from funding rival companies such as xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company. The two companies are competing for funding in the growing AI market, with OpenAI raising $6.6 billion in October to build more capable AI models. In March, xAI raised $6 billion in its own funding round to accelerate the development of “future technologies.”

xAI was also added to the complaint as a novel plaintiff, along with former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis – an executive at Musk’s Neuralink and the mother of three of his 12 children.

We’ve reached out to OpenAI and Microsoft for comment on the fixes.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and Greg Brockman, who are also defendants in the complaint, before he left the company in 2018. The previous lawsuit, which Musk initiated in March (and withdrew without explanation in June), accused OpenAI of abandoning the premise of an agreement to develop artificial intelligence that will benefit humanity, and claimed that the partnership with Microsoft made OpenAI “a de facto closed-source subsidiary source”, focused on maximizing profits.