Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning OpenAI’s original mission to develop artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
“OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed late on Thursday in San Francisco.
“Under its new board, it is not just developing but is refining an AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity,” claims the filing. “On information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm.”
OpenAI, which counts Musk among its cofounders, has a unique corporate structure. It is a nonprofit charged with safeguarding humanity against artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical AI system that can surpass humans at most tasks. But in late 2019, after Musk left the company’s board, it established a for-profit arm with a less altruistic focus. The explosive popularity of ChatGPT and demand for the underlying GPT-4 AI model has made that side of the company worth a reported $80 billion—and drawn the ire of Musk. Last year, the billionaire told CNBC he was “the reason that OpenAI exists,” thanks to his past investments.
The lawsuit takes aim at OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion into the AI company’s for-profit business in a controversial alliance that has attracted scrutiny from regulators in the US, the EU, and the UK. The UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, said in December that it was investigating to see whether the two companies had effectively merged. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft immediately replied to WIRED’s request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that the internal design of GPT-4, the company’s latest model, remains secret because Microsoft and OpenAI stand to make a fortune by selling access to the AI model to the public. “GPT-4 is hence the opposite of ‘Open AI,’” the filing reads.
AI systems exist across a spectrum of openness, ranging from fully open source to fully closed, depending on how much their inner workings are shared with researchers and members of the public. Those in favor of open source argue the approach allows greater transparency and potential for innovation. Arguments against include warnings that it makes powerful AI models potentially available to criminals or geopolitical adversaries. Meta’s Llama 2 model is free to download, modify, and deploy—though it does have some limitations on use—while GPT-4 is not.
“Let’s remember that Elon Musk has multiple competing AI efforts, but notably [he founded] xAI, a competing AI company,” says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI, and innovation at London’s Imperial College Business School. He adds that the lawsuit may be an attempt to slow down xAI’s competition.
Regardless, Shrier believes Musk’s lawsuit reflects broader anxiety about the commercial success of OpenAI, which pledges in its founding charter to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power. “He’s got a point insofar as OpenAI’s original mission appears to be somewhat different from where the business is headed today,” Shrier says.
OpenAI’s nonprofit arm was core to the company’s founding vision. “The nonprofit is in theory controlling the for-profit [side of the company],” says Nicolas Moës, executive director of the Future Society, a think tank based in Brussels. Altman has supported that setup in public. “The board can fire me, I think that’s important,” the CEO told Bloomberg in June.
Yet when the board did try to fire him in November, Altman was reinstated as CEO after five days of drama that involved a threatened staff exodus and Microsoft announcing the hire of key OpenAI executives, including Altman, to lead its own AI team. “The board crisis of OpenAI in November showed that this nonprofit [side of the business] has basically no say, is in complete disarray, and the board itself is not really in control of what the for-profit does,” says Moës.
When Altman was reinstated at OpenAI, he announced a new non-voting board seat for Microsoft.
“This dispute brings into focus a larger issue, which is the fact that many AI startups such as OpenAI find themselves in a position where they’re reliant on Big Tech finances and infrastructure because of the sheer computing power that AI needs to develop,” says Laura Lazaro Cabrera, counsel and director of the equity and data program at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.
The lawsuit casts Musk as a central figure in AI’s recent evolution, as well as someone who is deeply concerned about the direction the industry is taking. “Mr. Musk has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity,” it claims, “perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.”
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Morgan Meaker
