Elon Musk Drops Lawsuit Against OpenAI

Elon Musk has filed to dismiss his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who are now the CEO and president of OpenAI, respectively.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman in 2015, filed the lawsuit in February of this year, claiming that OpenAI abandoned its “irrevocable non-profit mission in the pursuit of profit.” The suit cited OpenAI’s reservation of advanced features for top-paying users and called it a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft due to the latter’s 49% stake in OpenAI’s commercial arm.

The lawsuit sought a jury trial and for OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman to return any profits. Musk moved to dismiss the lawsuit a day before a court hearing over the case without citing any reasons.

OpenAI strongly disputed the claims and quickly filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, calling it incoherent and frivolous.

OpenAI also published select internal communications from its early days, in which Musk appeared to agree to build a for-profit arm to generate the funds needed to develop artificial general intelligence.

OpenAI’s publication implied Musk left the firm because it refused his effort to merge it with Tesla. Musk claimed such a merger would give OpenAI the resources it needed to be a more powerful counterweight to Google’s AI development.

Musk dismissed the lawsuit a day after taking to his social media platform X to criticize OpenAI. Musk targeted OpenAI’s recently-announced partnership with Apple. Due to alleged privacy risks, Musk posted that Apple devices would no longer be permitted at his companies if Apple went ahead with the move.

Shortly after ChatGPT was released, Musk signed an open letter calling for a pause of AI development. He then went on to open his own AI company in July last year, quickly releasing a chatbot called Grok.