Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images; Marco Ravagli/Future Publishing via Getty Images
Elon Musk is charging ahead with his legal fight against OpenAI, extending his long-running feud with its CEO Sam Altman.
During a video interview at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Tuesday, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO once again said OpenAI has fundamentally changed from its original intent — which was to be an open-source, nonprofit that produced AI for the good of humanity.
“And now they’re trying to change that for their own financial benefit, into a for-profit company that is closed source,” Musk said.
Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 and later went on to start his own competing AI company, xAI, says he invested around $50 million in OpenAI when he co-founded it with Altman in 2015.
“So this would be like, let’s say you funded a nonprofit to help preserve the Amazon rainforest, but instead of doing that, they became a lumber company, chopped down the forest, and sold the wood,” Musk added. “You’d be like, wait a second, that’s not what I funded. That’s OpenAI.”
Musk first filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, before withdrawing it and replacing it with another suit claiming the company had “betrayed” its mission when it created a for-profit arm in 2019 and expanded its partnership with Microsoft in 2023. And in September of last year, OpenAI announced that it would be transitioning from a nonprofit into a for-profit company.
The ChatGPT maker then abandoned that commitment earlier this month, announcing that its nonprofit would stay in control of its for-profit division.
But, Musk and his legal team remain unconvinced by that pivot. His lawyers said in a filing earlier this month that OpenAI’s turnabout is “a façade that changes nothing,” arguing that it does little to restore the nonprofit’s original goal to serve the public.
An OpenAI spokesperson told BI in a statement that, “Elon continuing with his baseless lawsuit only proves that it was always a bad-faith attempt to slow us down.”
xAI and a lawyer for Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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