Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and its CEO, Sam Altman. This move marks the continuation of a legal battle that seemed to have ended in June, as detailed in an August 5 complaint filed in a U.S. federal court in California.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, initially sued the company in February. He accused OpenAI of failing to adhere to its commitment to operate as a nonprofit. In June, Musk appeared to drop the lawsuit following a blog post by OpenAI that included some of Musk’s private communications with the organization.

In the recent filing, Musk accuses Altman of “intentionally misleading” him by exploiting his concerns about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. The complaint claims that Altman “manipulated Musk into co-founding their supposedly nonprofit venture, OpenAI, Inc.”

AI companies fetch loftly valuations. Souce: CBInsights

Musk contends that he supported OpenAI’s nonprofit mission by lending his name, investing significant time and tens of millions of dollars, and recruiting top AI experts. However, according to the filing, Altman changed course as OpenAI neared a market-ready AI product and sought to profit financially.

OpenAI’s March blog post revealed private emails suggesting that Musk knew about OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit model. The emails imply that Musk supported the change, arguing that only for-profit companies like his own “Tesla…could compete with tech giants like Google.”

OpenAI stated, “In early 2017, we realized that building AGI would require substantial computational resources. Both we and Elon recognized the necessity of a for-profit entity to secure these resources.”

Since then, Musk has been vocal in his criticism of OpenAI and for-profit AI technology. He described OpenAI as a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft” in a 2023 post on the platform X.

Additionally, Musk’s social media platform, X, is reportedly facing scrutiny from Irish regulators following reports that changes to default settings allowed user data to be used in training Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok.

Source: Cointelegraph