Elon Musk takes on OpenAI and Sam Altman in groundbreaking lawsuit

Artificial Intelligence was definitely one of the most discussed topics last year. Moreover, the CEO of OpenAI, the leading company specializing in this area of technology, Sam Altman, was even nominated for the title of Time's Person of the Year. Now, his name again hit the headlines, as Elon Musk sues him because of how Altman decided to run this business.

On Thursday, April 29th, Elon Musk, an American billionaire and the owner of companies like Tesla or X (previously Twitter), filed a lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. He states that Altman has breached the contract by prioritizing commercial interests and profits over the development of AI for the public good and the well-being of humanity.

Let's remember: Musk could do that because he was one of the nine investors who 2015 paid a billion dollars each for the founding of OpenAI and undoubtedly helped this company at the very beginning of its existence. In 2018, he resigned from the OpenAI board, and a year later, Sam Altman's company started tight cooperation with Microsoft, which invested $13 billion in this business.

In justification for this lawsuit, Musk argued that the deal with Microsoft goes against the original intentions of OpenAI, which was supposed to be a non-profit organization serving the public good. "OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft," says the lawsuit, quoted by the New York Times.

Source: New York Times