Elon Musk’s lawsuit v. Sam Altman will go to trial this month in federal court in Oakland, California, where nine jurors will decide a years-long dispute between OpenAI’s co-founders over the group’s founding mission. While the disputes between Silicon Valley’s most influential billionaires are noteworthy in their own right, former OpenAI employees and nonprofit groups have taken particular interest in the case because the ruling could affect how the world’s leading artificial intelligence developer controls and distributes its technology.
The stakes are especially high for OpenAI’s corporate future, as a bad outcome in the case could negatively impact the company’s plans for an IPO later this year. The developer of ChatGPT is racing against Musk’s Anthropic and SpaceX (which currently owns rival AI lab xAI) to go public. Musk’s status as a competitor to OpenAI – which could stand to gain significantly if the case is successful – has raised earnest questions about whether he is the right person to take the case to a jury. An out-of-court settlement is still possible, although legal experts and people close to the case say it is unlikely.
Here’s everything you need to know Musk v. Altman.
What kind of coincidence is this?
Musk essentially accuses OpenAI of straying from its founding nonprofit mission: to ensure that AGI, a highly competent artificial intelligence system that can perform a wide range of tasks, benefits humanity. The defendants in the case are OpenAI, Altman, OpenAI CEO and co-founder Greg Brockman, and OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft.
Despite generating billions of dollars in revenue, OpenAI is still overseen by a nonprofit organization today. Musk was one of the original co-founders of the nonprofit OpenAI and initially donated about $38 million to it, but he split in 2018 after disagreements with Altman and Brockman. Now Musk’s lawsuit has been reduced to three main claims against OpenAI.
The first is whether OpenAI has breached its trust in the charity. Musk says that at the beginning of OpenAI, he believed he was investing in a nonprofit organization focused on open source or making AI technology widely available for free download. Musk, however, maintains that Altman and Brockman did not exploit his investment as he intended. OpenAI now has a for-profit division that generates billions of dollars in annual revenue, and the company keeps a tight lid on the code of its top AI models. (OpenAI claims Musk knew about this back in 2017 the company would need a for-profit divisionand even helped its co-founders create a corporate structure.) Microsoft is accused of aiding and abetting the breach of trust of a charity.
The second main claim is fraud, specifically that Altman and Brockman deceived Musk about his intentions to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company. The third allegation is unjust enrichment, according to which Altman, Brockman and other OpenAI investors enriched themselves at Musk’s expense.
The defendants argue that Musk’s claims are baseless and that he is simply trying to cripple OpenAI by trying to build xAI.
Musk is asking the court for a variety of remedies, including removing Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI, returning “ill-gotten gains” to the nonprofit founder of ChatGPT, and blocking OpenAI from existing as a public benefit corporation, which currently includes its for-profit arm.
When reached for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson referred WIRED to the company’s department blog which reads: “Driven by jealousy, regret at leaving OpenAI, and a desire to derail a rival artificial intelligence company, Elon spent years harassing OpenAI through baseless lawsuits and public attacks.” Musk’s lawyers did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Why should I care?
Former OpenAI researchers and AI security nonprofits that filed genial briefs in the case in support of Musk say they believe it’s vital that the ChatGPT creator be held accountable to its core principles of safety and benefit to humanity, especially in the face of growing commercial pressures.
Jacob Hilton is among a group of former OpenAI employees who signed one of these contracts short opposing in particular the transformation of OpenAI into a for-profit entity. “It’s definitely important that OpenAI lives up to its mission. I think we still see a lot of things that OpenAI is doing that I don’t think are consistent with its mission. One recent example that people are talking about is their support for an Illinois bill that would protect them from liability,” Hilton says.