OpenAI says allegations in Elon Musk lawsuit ‘incoherent’

“There is no founding agreement or any agreement at all with Musk,” OpenAI said in a lawsuit as a defendant in Elon Musk’s lawsuit. Of course, we’re talking about the lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI, which accuses it of violating its nonprofit status, as well as violating a founding agreement promising that the organization would never operate for profit and release its AI publicly. The company said the billionaire’s claims were based on “entangled – often unrelated – factual premises.” He called that founding agreement “a fiction that Musk concocted to lay undeserved claim to the fruits of an enterprise he first supported, then abandoned, then watched succeed without him.”

If the case comes to light, there is evidence to show that Musk supported OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit structure “to be controlled by Musk himself,” OpenAI continues. It is also claimed that the billionaire stopped supporting the project when his ideas were not followed through. That statement echoes the company’s blog post from earlier this month, which published alleged emails to and from Musk from when he was still involved with the organization. Based on these exchanges, Musk knew and supported the transformation of OpenAI into a for-profit organization. He even wanted full control over him as CEO and to have majority equity. Musk also agreed to a proposal that the organization be attached to Tesla so that the automaker can secure its financing. In the end, the parties did not reach an agreement and Musk ended his participation.

“Seeing the remarkable technological progress that OpenAI has made, Musk now wants that success for himself,” OpenAI wrote in its filing. “Musk claims to be filing this suit for humanity, when the truth—evident even on the face of Musk’s contradictory pleadings—is that he is filing it to advance his own commercial interests.”

Last year, Musk unveiled his own artificial intelligence company called xAI, with the rather lofty goal of understanding “the true nature of the universe.” A few days after OpenAI published its blog post claiming that Musk knew he never intended to open source its technology, the billionaire announced that xAI would open source its Grok chatbot. While it may be mining OpenAI, open-source Grok can also receive feedback from its company from the developer community, which xAI can then use to improve its technology.