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Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning OpenAI’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed late on Thursday in San Francisco.
“Under its new board, it is not just developing but is refining an AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” claims the filing. “On information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm.”
Musk is one of the cofounders of OpenAI. The lawsuit claims he played a central role in establishing the company by contributing over $44 million between 2016 and 2020, paying for office space and convincing key team members, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, to join the business. Musk did all this, the lawsuit claims, because he wanted to support a nonprofit that would develop AI to benefit humanity. Instead his contributions were “twisted,” the filing claims, for the benefit of both OpenAI and Microsoft.
“Imagine donating to a nonprofit whose asserted mission is to protect the Amazon rainforest, but then the nonprofit creates a for-profit Amazonian logging company that uses the fruits of the donations to clear the rainforest,” reads the lawsuit. “That is the story of OpenAI, Inc.”
OpenAI has a unique corporate structure. It is a nonprofit charged with safeguarding humanity against artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical AI system that can surpass humans at most tasks. But in late 2019, after Musk left the company’s board, it also established a for-profit arm with a less altruistic focus. (The profits of OpenAI LP are technically capped; investors can get back 100 times their investment, while any amount beyond that limit goes back to the nonprofit.) The explosive popularity of ChatGPT and demand for the underlying GPT-4 AI model has made that side of the company worth a reported $80 billion—and drawn the ire of Musk.
The lawsuit describes how OpenAI’s structure has become “increasingly complex” in recent years. It also takes aim at OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion into the AI company’s for-profit business in an alliance that has attracted scrutiny from regulators in the US, the EU, and the UK. The UK regulator, the CMA, said in December that it was investigating to see if the partnership could potentially impact competition in the AI space. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft immediately replied to WIRED’s request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that the internal design of GPT-4, the company’s latest model, remains secret because Microsoft and OpenAI stand to make a fortune by selling access to the AI model to the public. "GPT-4 is hence the opposite of 'Open AI'," the filing reads.
AI systems exist across a spectrum of openness, ranging from fully open source to fully closed, depending on how much their inner workings are shared with researchers and members of the public. Those in favor of open source argue the approach allows greater transparency and potential for innovation. Arguments against include warnings that it makes powerful AI models potentially available to criminals or geopolitical adversaries. Meta’s Llama 2 model is free to download, modify, and deploy—though it does have some limitations on use—while GPT-4 is not.
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“Let's remember that Elon Musk has multiple competing AI efforts, but notably [he founded] xAI, a competing AI company,” says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at London’s Imperial College Business School. He adds that the lawsuit may be an attempt to slow down xAI’s competition.
Regardless, Shrier believes Musk’s lawsuit reflects broader anxiety about the commercial success of OpenAI, which pledges in its founding charter to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. “He's got a point insofar as OpenAI's original mission appears to be somewhat different from where the business is headed today,” Shrier says.
OpenAI’s nonprofit arm was core to the company’s founding vision. “The nonprofit is in theory controlling the for-profit [side of the company],” says Nicolas Moës, executive director of the Future Society, a think tank. Altman has supported that setup in public. “The board can fire me, I think that’s important,” the CEO told Bloomberg in June.
Yet when the board did fire him in November, Altman was reinstated as CEO after five days of drama that involved a threatened staff exodus and Microsoft announcing the hire of key OpenAI executives, including Altman, to lead its own AI team. “The board crisis of OpenAI in November showed that this nonprofit [side of the business] has basically no say, is in complete disarray, and the board itself is not really in control of what the for profit does,” says Moës.
When Altman was reinstated at OpenAI, he announced a new non-voting board seat for Microsoft.
“This dispute brings into focus a larger issue, which is the fact that many AI startups such as OpenAI find themselves in a position where they're reliant on big tech finances and infrastructure, because of the sheer computing power that AI needs to develop,” says Laura Lazaro Cabrera, counsel and director of the equity and data program at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.
The lawsuit casts Musk as a central figure in the AI’s recent evolution, as well as someone who is deeply concerned about the direction the industry is taking.
When Musk was helping Altman recruit talent for OpenAI, he was preoccupied with the progress being made by AI company Google DeepMind, according to the lawsuit, which was causing him “extreme mental stress.” The filing claims that Musk “believed (and still does) that in the hands of a closed, for-profit company like Google, AGI poses a particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity.”
Altman told Musk that OpenAI would be “the opposite of Google,” the lawsuit claims. Now Musk is alleging that his money was used instead to create a “for-profit partner of the world’s largest corporation.”
Updated: 3/1/2024, 11:02 am EST: This story has been updated to include additional details from the lawsuit.
