Elon Musk has asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, its co-founders, and investor Microsoft, accusing the companies of anticompetitive behavior. This was reported by TechCrunch.
The motion was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, company president Greg Brockman, Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder and former OpenAI board member Reed Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft vice president Dee Templeton.
Among the accusations voiced in the appeal:
- Discouraging investors from backing OpenAI rivals like Musk’s own AI company, xAI.
- Benefiting from “wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information” through OpenAI’s connections with Microsoft.
- Converting OpenAI’s governance structure to a for-profit and “transferring any material assets, including intellectual property owned, held, or controlled by OpenAI, Inc., its subsidiaries, or affiliates.”
- Causing OpenAI to do business with organizations in which any defendant has a “material financial interest.”
Musk is essentially accusing OpenAI of abandoning its original nonprofit mission of making the results of its AI research available to everyone. The billionaire had filed a similar motion earlier this year, but withdrew it in July 2024 for revision.
The amended lawsuit added new defendants, including Microsoft, Hoffman, and Templeton, as well as two new plaintiffs: Siobhan Zilis, a Neuralink executive and former OpenAI board member, and xAI.
In previous complaints, Musk claimed that he donated $44 million to OpenAI because of the company's commitment to making artificial intelligence accessible. But the transition to a commercial structure undermines those promises.
“No objective observer can look at OpenAI today and say it bears any resemblance whatsoever to what it promised to be,” attorneys for Musk wrote. “Plaintiffs respectfully request that the court maintain the status quo and pause defendants’ worsening behavior until final disposition.”
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit organization and in 2019 converted to a "limited profit" organization in which the nonprofit became the governing body for a for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI is currently in the process of converting to a fully commercial corporation.