OpenAI countersued Elon Musk on Wednesday, claiming the world’s richest man is waging a “relentless campaign” to damage it after he unceremoniously left the ChatGPT maker several years ago.
“Musk could not tolerate seeing such success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed,” the generative artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer said in a filing in North California’s federal court. “He made it his project to take down OpenAI, and to build a direct competitor that would seize the technological lead — not for humanity but for Elon Musk.”
“The ensuing campaign has been relentless. Through press attacks, malicious campaigns broadcast to Musk’s more than 200 million followers on the social media platform (X) he controls, a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims, and a sham bid for OpenAI’s assets, Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI,” the filing said.
As part of its filing, OpenAI is seeking an injunction to halt Musk’s “further unlawful and unfair action” and compensation for damages allegedly caused by his actions.
The especially nasty tone of the lawsuit marks the latest round in an increasingly bitter bout between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk, the Tesla Inc. CEO and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who sued OpenAI last year, alleging the company of betraying its founding mission.
Musk founded a competing GenAI startup, xAI, in 2023 and this year led a nearly $100 billion bid to buy OpenAI’s non-profit owner. [OpenAI flatly rejected the offer.]
Musk was among its initial backers alongside Altman when OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab with the goal to “benefit all humanity.”
But things soured by 2018, when Musk departed after OpenAI’s leadership refused “to bow to Musk’s demands for control of the enterprise or, alternatively, its absorption into Musk’s electric car company, Tesla,” the lawsuit charges.
OpenAI claims, among other things, that Musk failed to fulfill a personal financial commitment to the organization, delivering “not even close” to a promised $1 billion.
The San Francisco-based company — which has partnered with SoftBank and Oracle Corp. on a four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure project in the U.S. called Stargate backed by the Trump Administration — is now valued at $300 billion after its latest funding round of $40 billion, the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. A good portion of the funding round is contingent on OpenAI making the transition from nonprofit to for-profit status.
