Elon Musk sues OpenAI, Sam Altman again

Billionaire Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its leadership once again, weeks after withdrawing a previous suit against the artificial intelligence startup he co-founded in 2015.

The new suit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California revived Musk's claims from the earlier suit that the company, along with two of his fellow co-founders, current CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, breached its founding mission of developing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology for humanity's benefit. Musk departed the company's board in 2018 after he felt it had fallen behind Google in the AI race.

"After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI, Inc., Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices," the latest complaint reads. 

It alleges that once OpenAI's technology started to transform AGI, Altman "flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in."

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The suit seeks a judicial determination that OpenAI's license to Microsoft to use its AI models is null and void. Musk also contends that OpenAI's language models are outside the scope of the company's partnership with Microsoft.

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OpenAI has a licensing partnership with Microsoft, under which the big-tech giant invests billions of dollars into the startup in exchange for using its large language models for its computing services.

In June, Musk withdrew an earlier lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman that had accused them of abandoning the startup's original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit.

Attorneys for Musk had asked the California state court to dismiss the suit, originally filed in February, without providing a reason for the move.

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In the case filed in February, Musk had said that OpenAI's three founders had originally agreed to work on AI in a way that would "benefit humanity."

The now-withdrawn lawsuit elicited a response from OpenAI's executives, who wrote a blog post detailing the company's history with Musk.

Altman, Brockman and fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever wrote in March that they "intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims." 

They also shared Musk's communications with them about OpenAI's structure during that period, which revealed that Musk floated the idea of merging OpenAI with Tesla, while he also sought to be the company's CEO and to have majority control of its equity and the board of directors.

They added that they regret the falling out with Musk in light of their recent success with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2023 and his move to launch a rival AI company.

When reached for comment on Monday, an OpenAI spokesperson told FOX Business, "As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves."

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Last year, Musk unveiled a new AI company called xAI with a chatbot called Grok that he billed as a rival to OpenAI. 

In May, xAI announced that it received $6 billion in Series B funding from investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, according to the company.

FOX Business' Eric Revell and Reuters contributed to this report.