Sam Altman’s OpenAI Rubbishes Non-Profit ‘Founding Agreement’ As ‘Fiction’ Conjured By Elon Musk

What Happened: OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft, which was co-founded by Musk in 2015, has dismissed the allegations made by the tech billionaire in a lawsuit filed against them, reported CNBC.

In a document on file with California’s superior court for San Francisco County, OpenAI stated, “There is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk, as the complaint itself makes clear.”

“The Founding Agreement is instead a fiction Musk has conjured to lay unearned claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, then abandoned, then watched succeed without him,” it read.

In the lawsuit, filed earlier this month, Musk alleged that there was a “founding agreement” in 2015 between himself and two other OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, which stipulated that the AI lab would operate as a non-profit and not keep information private for commercial gain.

He claimed that OpenAI breached this agreement by releasing the GPT-4 large language model without providing scientific details for public consumption.

However, the ChatGPT-maker has refuted the existence of any such agreement. The company has called Musk’s case frivolous and stated that Musk himself supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI.

“Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself,” the document read. “So he brings this action accusing Defendants of breaching a contract that never existed and duties Musk was never owed, demanding relief calculated to benefit a competitor to OpenAI.”

Why It Matters: Following Musk’s lawsuit, OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla characterized the legal action as a “salve on a bruised ego,” suggesting that Musk’s decision to sue was driven by his ego rather than any legitimate grievance.

Earlier, it was also revealed that Musk had once suggested that OpenAI’s only path to compete with Alphabet Inc.‘s Google was through a merger with Tesla. However, his proposal wasn’t met with much enthusiasm and he left the ChatGPT-parent in 2018.

Meanwhile, Musk has announced that his AI venture, xAI, will open-source the code of its AI chatbot Grok, this week, while also throwing shade at OpenAI by calling the company itself a “lie.”

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.