Musk drops lawsuit against OpenAI, co-founders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Tuesday moved to dismiss his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, after alleging they failed to adhere to the company’s founding mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity.

Musk’s attorney submitted the request for the case’s dismissal “without prejudice” in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday, without providing further reasoning on the move.

The suit, filed in February by Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, alleged that Altman and the AI company set its founding agreement “aflame” when partnering with Microsoft.

A hearing over OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the case was initially scheduled for Wednesday, according to court filings.

The Hill reached out to OpenAI and attorneys for Musk, Altman, and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman, who was also listed in the suit, for comment.

According to the suit, Musk, Altman and Brockman agreed in 2015 that OpenAI would be a nonprofit that developed AGI for the benefit of humanity and would remain open source. The suit stated the ChatGPT maker and its co-founders “reaffirmed” the agreement with Musk “on multiple occasions.”

Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018, now owns a separate AI company called xAI, alongside his ventures as the leader of the social media platform X, car manufacturer Tesla and space firm SpaceX.

The suit pointed to the creation of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, released in March 2023, and alleged Altman “caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public.”

OpenAI did not provide details about GPT-4’s internal design, as it did with earlier models, in a move Musk argued was primarily for commercial reasons.

Musk’s move to dismiss the suit comes one day after he criticized Apple’s new integration of OpenAI’s ChaptGPT on its new software and devices.

He threatened to ban his companies’ employees from using Apple devices if the tech giant proceeded with its new AI feature.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X.

Apple on Monday said its new “Intelligence” feature will use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help users prioritize their notifications or help rewrite language across apps, including in emails, notes or messages.

xAI launched its own text-generating AI model as competition to ChatGPT, named Grok, earlier this year.