Elon Musk has added Microsoft and the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman to the list of defendants in his long-running legal dispute with OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker called the claim “baseless and overreaching.”
In a fresh amended complaint with the US District Court, Northern District of California, the rocket and electric car entrepreneur alleges that Microsoft’s involvement with OpenAI – the highly valued startup behind a string of attention-grabbing LLMs – amounts to anti-competitive practices.
Microsoft has been a close partner of OpenAI since 2019 and is reported to have invested around $13 billion in the company.
Musk filed suit against OpenAI in February, alleging a breach of contract in the AI company’s move away from open technology and its original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. That action was later ended without explanation, only for Musk to launch a new lawsuit in August.
“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon – and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public,” the new submission alleges from the start and continues in much the same vein.
The Register has offered Microsoft and OpenAI the opportunity to respond.
An OpenAI spokesperson said: “Elon’s third attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones. His prior emails continue to speak for themselves.”
In March, OpenAI published a trove of emails that appeared to show Musk was not only aware of the need for OpenAI to become a for-profit entity – one of the central issues in the claim – but also wanted to merge OpenAI into Tesla and become CEO.
The new amended complaint alleges that Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman and Dee Templeton, a Microsoft vice president, had acted against antitrust laws because both were involved with the boards of OpenAI and Microsoft.
“The purpose of the prohibition on interlocking directorates is to prevent the sharing of competitively sensitive information in violation of the antitrust laws and/or providing a forum for the coordination of other anticompetitive activity. Allowing Templeton and Hoffman to serve as members of OpenAI’s board undermined this purpose,” the complaint said.
The document also adds Musk AI startup xAI and Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member, as plaintiffs in the case. ®