OpenAI Plans to Move to Dismiss Elon Musk’s Lawsuit

OpenAI plans to move to dismiss all the claims made in a lawsuit by Elon Musk.

The artificial intelligence (AI) firm said this in a Tuesday (March 5) blog post in which it said it remains committed to a mission to “ensure AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity.”

The company’s mission includes building AI that is safe and beneficial, and helping to create benefits that are broadly distributed, it said in the post.

“We are dedicated to the OpenAI mission and have pursued it every step of the way,” the post said.

This post comes six days after Musk’s attorneys filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, saying that the company deviated from its mission to develop AI that benefits humanity.

The lawsuit claims that two co-founders of OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, asked Musk in 2015 to help create a nonprofit dedicated to developing AGI to benefit humanity.

“To this day, OpenAI, Inc.’s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI ‘benefits all of humanity,’” the lawsuit said. “In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc., has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”

In its Tuesday blog post, OpenAI said that it realized building AGI will require “far more resources than we’d originally imagined,” that the company and Musk agreed in 2017 that a for-profit entity would be necessary to acquire those resources, and that OpenAI advances its mission by building beneficial tools that are widely available.

The company said in the post that Musk suggested in February 2018 that OpenAI merge with Tesla, creating an entity that could better compete with Google in the field of AI.

“Elon soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was 0, and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla,” the post said. “When he left in late February 2018, he told our team he was supportive of us finding our own path to raising billions of dollars.”

On Tuesday and Wednesday (March 6), Musk replied to a Tuesday post on the social media platform X in which OpenAI shared a link to its blog post.

In one reply, he said, “Change your name”; in the next reply, he added, “To ClosedAI and I will drop the lawsuit.”