Musk Escalates Altman Legal Feud, Casting OpenAI as Monopolist

Elon Musk is ramping up his feud with Sam Altman, alleging in a court filing that OpenAI is trying to corner the market for generative artificial intelligence and sacrificing safety in a race to get ahead.

In a revised version of a lawsuit he filed in August, Musk highlighted antitrust concerns about OpenAI’s journey from its nonprofit roots in 2015 — when he and Altman worked together as founders — to its current effort to restructure as a for-profit company following billions of dollars in outside investment by Microsoft and others.

Musk, who launched his xAI startup last year, said OpenAI has now abandoned all pretense of proceeding as a charity to benefit humanity with a focus on openness and safety as it tries to complete its restructuring under a two-year deadline.

“Microsoft and OpenAI, apparently unsatisfied with their monopoly, or near so, in generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) are now actively trying to eliminate competitors, such as xAI, by extracting promises from investors not to fund them,” lawyers for the billionaire wrote in the amended complaint filed late Thursday in federal court in Oakland, California.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment. In October, it called Musk’s federal suit — which followed a state-court suit that Musk dropped — the latest bid in an “increasingly blusterous campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage.”

The revised suit lists 26 legal claims and runs 107 pages, compared with 15 claims in the 83-page original complaint.

Thursday’s filing adds California Attorney General Rob Bonta as a defendant. The company is in early talks with Bonta’s office over the process to change its corporate structure, Bloomberg News reported this month.

Representatives of Bonta’s office didn’t immediately respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment.

To back up his claim that OpenAI is becoming more anticompetitive, Musk said in the filing that the company “has attempted to starve competitors of AI talent by aggressively recruiting employees with offers of lavish compensation, and is on track to spend $1.5 billion on personnel for just 1,500 employees.”

Musk also expressed concern that OpenAI has “started to contract with the Department of Defense” and removed a clause from its usage policies banning the use of its technology for “activity that has a high risk of physical harm” such as “weapons development” or “military and warfare.”

According to the filing, “droves” of security researchers are resigning in protest, or being forced out, and safety teams have been dissolved, “all to make way for ‘security’ personnel whose real job is to facilitate military contracting.”

Top photo: Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an event in Seoul, South Korea, on Friday, June 9, 2023. OpenAI is focused on building a better, faster and cheaper model of its generative AI ChatGPT product, Altman has said previously. The product made AI a buzzword and kicked off a global race among tech companies to build their own versions of the chatbot technology. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg.