Elon Musk Withdraws Lawsuit Against OpenAI

2024-06-12

Elon Musk has withdrawn his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing the company of violating the contract and deviating from the original intention of creating artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of humanity. Earlier reports indicated that the case was dismissed in an unbiased manner, which means Musk may still file a lawsuit in the future.


Musk's decision to withdraw the lawsuit, filed in a California state court in February of this year (case number CGC24612746), coincided with the judge's scheduled hearing to dismiss OpenAI's request to dismiss the case. This also happened after Musk publicly stated that if Apple integrates OpenAI's technology into the "operating system level" of iPhones and Macs, he would ban his company from using Apple devices the next day. In addition, he made a series of unusual threats.

In his complaint, Musk claimed that OpenAI violated the agreement reached with him and other founding members, in which everyone promised to build OpenAI as a non-profit organization and maintain the openness of its technology.

However, Musk's lawsuit has some issues:

Musk directly accused OpenAI of violating a non-existent contract. This contract does not actually exist! In the complaint, he mentioned the so-called "founding agreement," but did not submit it as evidence to the court as an attachment. The part of the breach of contract claim also admits that the "founding agreement" was basically an understanding reached through email communication.

Shortly after Musk filed the lawsuit, OpenAI countered his accusations, stating that the billionaire was attempting to "exert absolute control" over the company by merging OpenAI with Tesla. OpenAI also insisted that they "never reached any agreement" with Musk.

Last year, Musk founded his own AI company, xAI, which has launched a chatbot called Grok AI that users can access through the X Premium subscription service. Since then, the startup has raised $6 billion in funding from investors to support the high-cost chips required for its AI system. Last week, CNBC reported on email content suggesting that Musk transferred thousands of Nvidia H100 AI chips originally reserved for Tesla to xAI.