Elon 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 is one of the founders of OpenAI, which aims to research and develop AI for the benefit of humanity and was initially established as a nonprofit organization. He left the company in 2018 after disagreements over the company's direction.
In the complaint, Musk's lawyers claim that OpenAI is now “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 described in the filing as a “de facto merger.”
“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. “We have suffered without limit damages by exclusively exchanging confidential information about the above,” the complaint, filed late Thursday in federal court in Oakland, California, says.
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 briefly appointed as a non-voting observer to OpenAI, the amended filing alleges that she was in a position to facilitate an antitrust agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI. There is.
“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.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is named as a defendant in Musk's complaint, along with Microsoft, Hoffman, and Templeton. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that OpenAI was in talks with Bonta's office over the process of changing its corporate structure.
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.
In the 107-page amended complaint, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alleges that OpenAI sold its cryptocurrency in January 2018, before ultimately deciding to move to a restricted profits structure. It includes the unusual detail that he proposed selling it. Musk appears to have rejected the idea of selling cryptocurrencies.
In an email to Altman dated January 21, 2018, Musk said, “After paying attention and speaking with some of our safety teams, there were a number of concerns about the ICO and unintended consequences going forward.” Ta. is shown. An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an unregulated means of raising funds for a cryptocurrency business. “I'm going to stress the need to keep this confidential, but I think it's really important to get buy-in and give people the opportunity to consider it early on.”
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 bargaining 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. ”
OpenAI is seeking to dismiss Musk's lawsuit, calling it “exaggerated” and baseless.