Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of betraying its foundational mission by putting the pursuit of profit ahead of the benefit of humanity.
The world’s richest man, a founding board member of the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, claimed Altman had “set aflame” OpenAI’s founding agreement by signing an investment deal with Microsoft.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco on Thursday, claims OpenAI is now developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a theoretical form of AI that can perform a range of tasks at or above a human level of intelligence – for profit rather than for the benefit of humankind.
“OpenAI Inc has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft. Under its new board, it is not just developing but is actually refining an AGI to maximise profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” the lawsuit alleges.
The suit opens with Musk’s often-stated warning that AGI poses “a grave threat to humanity”.
“Where some like Mr Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power,” said the lawsuit, adding that in the hands of for-profit companies such as Google, AGI poses a “particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity”.
Musk and other tech experts are concerned that an AGI could evade human control and take actions that endanger the planet.
The suit claims Altman purported to share Musk’s concerns over AGI and in 2015 proposed forming a non-profit AI lab that would be “the opposite of Google”, now known as OpenAI. Together with Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who is also being sued by Musk, the three men agreed to create a lab whose principles would be enshrined in a founding agreement.
The lab would be “for the benefit of humanity”, would be a not-for-profit company and would be open-source, the term for making the technology freely available.
The lawsuit claims that Musk, who stepped away from OpenAI in 2018, was a “moving force” behind the creation of OpenAI and supplied a majority of its funding in its early years. Microsoft is now the biggest investor in OpenAI’s profit-making arm, which Altman runs, after a deal struck in 2020.