A tech mogul has accused his former startup co-founder of carrying out an “illegal conversion for profit” of an artificial intelligence firm.
Court documents filed Tuesday reveal that tech billionaire Elon Musk is seeking to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman as part of his lawsuit against the artificial intelligence giant.
The mogul sued OpenAI in 2024, alleging it defrauded him of $38 million in seed funding he contributed when he co-founded the company in 2015, under the understanding that it would remain a nonprofit. The AI startup, valued at $852 billion, was reorganized late last year, and is now run as a nonprofit, which owns a 26% stake in its for-profit arm, which also includes ChatGPT.
Musk’s lawyers are demanding “Sam Altman and Greg Brockman be stripped of their positions of authority and the personal financial benefits they derived from OpenAI’s illegal profit operations and conversion,” As per the latest filing.
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Both branches of OpenAI also need to honor commitments “Safety-first AI development and open research for the broader benefit of humanity,” Musk’s legal team said. According to the amended complaint, any damages awarded will go to the AI company’s non-profit arm. The case is to be heard later this month.
OpenAI in turn has accused Musk of attempting to discredit the company “Completely baseless allegations,” And reportedly alleged that he is colluding with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to weaken competition.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman, bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, and launched his own artificial intelligence firm XAI the following year.
In February, xAI and OpenAI announced deals with the Pentagon to integrate their artificial intelligence tools into classified systems of the US military. Altman claimed that his company agreed to cooperate under the condition that its equipment would not be used for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
However, these same two conditions have been non-negotiable for the Pentagon with Anthropic, the US military’s previous plan for AI needs. The US War Department has officially designated Anthropic a supply chain risk that threatens national security, after the tech company refused to remove security measures from its cloud model.
Anthropic’s latest AI model is “Highly autonomous,” The company claimed Wednesday that it can reason like an advanced security researcher and is too powerful for public release, as it continues to fight the Pentagon in court.
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