Lawyers for technology billionaire Elon Musk have done that submitted for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, certain of its co-founders, and its investor and close associate, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel alleges is anticompetitive conduct.
The motion for an injunction, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder and former OpenAI board member Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton of various illegal activities and is working to put a stop to them. The allegations include:
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Discouraging investors from backing OpenAI rivals like Musk’s own AI company, xAI.
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Profiting from “wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information” through OpenAI’s connections to Microsoft.
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Converting OpenAI’s governance structure to a for-profit and “transferring all tangible assets, including intellectual property, owned, held or controlled by OpenAI, Inc., its subsidiaries or affiliates.”
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This ensures that OpenAI does business with organizations in which a suspect has a ‘material financial interest’.
Lawyers for Musk claim “irreparable harm” will occur if the injunction is not granted.
“Plaintiffs and the public need a break,” they wrote in the filing. “An injunction to preserve what remains of OpenAI’s non-profit nature, free from self-dealing, is the only appropriate remedy. If not, the OpenAI promised to Musk and the public will be long gone by the time the court reaches the merits.”
Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which essentially accuses the company of abandoning its original nonprofit mission to make the fruits of its AI research available to everyone, was withdrawn in July, just to be revived late this summer. In one amended complaint in November, the lawsuit named new defendants, including Microsoft, Hoffman and Templeton, and two new plaintiffs: Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and ex-OpenAI board member, and xAI.
Musk has argued in previous lawsuits that he was defrauded of the more than $44 million he said he donated to OpenAI by exploiting his “well-known concerns about the existential harm” of AI. Musk, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left the company in 2018 over disagreements over its direction.
In the motion for an injunction, Musk’s lawyers allege that OpenAI is depriving xAI of capital by coercing promises from investors not to fund the company and its competitors. In October the Financial Times published reported that OpenAI demanded investors in its company latest financing round refrain from funding OpenAI’s rivals, including xAI.