Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk expanded his lawsuit against ChatGate maker OpenAI, adding federal antitrust and other claims and adding Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest financial backer, as a defendant.
Musk’s amended lawsuit, filed Thursday night in federal court in Oakland, California, says Microsoft and OpenAI sought to unlawfully monopolize the market for generic artificial intelligence and sideline rivals.
Like Musk’s original August complaint, it accused OpenAI and its chief executive, Samuel Altman, of violating contract provisions by prioritizing profits over the public good to advance AI.
“Never before had a corporation gone from a tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion-for-profit, market-crippling company – and in just eight years,” the complaint said. It wants to revoke OpenAI’s license with Microsoft and force them to sell “ill-gotten” profits.
OpenAI said in a statement that the latest lawsuit “is even more baseless and exaggerated than previous lawsuits.” Microsoft declined to comment.
“Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices have escalated,” Musk’s attorney Mark Toberoff said in a statement. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Musk has a long-standing animosity toward OpenAI, a startup he co-founded and which has since become the face of generic AI through billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft.
Musk has gained new prominence as a major force in the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump. After donating millions of dollars to Trump’s Republican campaign, Trump nominated Musk to a new role designed to reduce government waste.
The expanded lawsuit says OpenAI and Microsoft violated antitrust law by conditioning investment opportunities on the companies’ agreements not to deal with competitors. It said the companies’ exclusive licensing agreement amounts to a merger in the absence of regulatory approval.
In a court filing last month, OpenAI accused Musk of pursuing the lawsuit as part of a “rapidly escalating propaganda campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage.”
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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