Musk's lawsuit accusing OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission was dismissed in July, but the lawsuit was refiled in August. The amended complaint names Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft vice president Dee Templeton as new defendants.
The amended filing also adds new plaintiffs: Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and former OpenAI board member, and Musk's AI company xAI.
Musk's lawyers allege in the complaint that OpenAI is “actively seeking to exclude competitors” such as xAI by “extracting commitments from investors not to provide funding.” The company is also said to have unfairly benefited from Microsoft's infrastructure and expertise in what Musk's lawyers describe as a “de facto” merger in the filing.
“xAI is subject to the inability to license Microsoft's exclusive licensed OpenAI technology, the inability to obtain computing from Microsoft on terms as favorable as those that OpenAI receives, and the conflicts between OpenAI and Microsoft. have been harmed without limit by the exclusive exchange of confidential information on.
The suit alleges that Mr. Hoffman was a member of the boards of Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as a partner in the investment firm Greylock, giving him privileged and illegal authority to conduct transactions between the two companies. (Hoffman resigned from OpenAI's board in 2023.) Musk's lawyers say Greylock invested in Inflection, an AI startup that Microsoft acquired earlier this year, and the complaint says that He says it's reasonable to think of Kuction as a competitor to OpenAI.
As for Templeton, who Microsoft temporarily appointed as a non-voting observer for OpenAI, the amended filing alleges that she was in a position to facilitate an antitrust agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI. are.
“The purpose of the prohibition on board interlocking is to prevent competitively sensitive information from being shared in violation of antitrust laws and/or to provide a forum for coordinating other anticompetitive activities. “to do so,” the complaint states. “We allow Templeton and Hoffman to serve as members of OpenAI….The board has defeated this purpose.”
Gillis, who resigned from OpenAI's board in 2023 after serving as a member for about four years, is an “injured employee” under California Corporation Law, according to the amended complaint. According to the complaint, Gillis repeatedly raised internal concerns about the company's dealings with OpenAI, but went unheeded. The complaint says the concerns are similar to Musk's.
Gillis has close ties to Musk, and in addition to leading research on Neuralink, he was a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019. (Neuralink is Musk's brain-computer interface venture.) She is also the mother of Musk's three children, Techno Mechanicus and twins Strider and Azure.
The 107-page amended complaint alleges that OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, said in September 2017 that OpenAI It includes the unusual detail that he proposed selling cryptocurrencies, a proposal Musk is said to have rejected.
The gist of the lawsuit remains unchanged on the plaintiff's side. Despite benefiting from Musk's early involvement, OpenAI violated its nonprofit pledge to make the results of its AI research available to everyone. “No amount of clever drafting or creative trade research can obscure what is going on here,” the complaint says. “OpenAI, Inc. was co-founded by Mr. Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency… [is] It is rapidly becoming a fully commercial subsidiary of Microsoft. ”