Musk sues OpenAI over its for-profit turn

Elon Musk filed suit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in the Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices. Musk, an early funder of OpenAI who left its board in 2018, alleged that Altman and Brockman had induced him to help seed the nonprofit on the understanding that any resulting artificial general intelligence would be developed openly and “for the benefit of humanity,” and that this founding agreement had been abandoned once OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary and entered its exclusive partnership with Microsoft. The complaint argued OpenAI was now developing AGI to maximise Microsoft’s profits rather than the public’s benefit, and sought a court order compelling OpenAI to make its research and technology open and barring it from directing its most capable models — including, by name, GPT-4 — toward Microsoft’s or any individual’s financial gain.

OpenAI disputed the premise directly, stating in a subsequent court filing that “there is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk” beyond ordinary donor and advisory arrangements, and separately published emails it said showed Musk had himself proposed a for-profit structure and sought majority equity and control before departing.

Musk withdrew the suit in June 2024 without explanation, then refiled a similar complaint in a different court in August, adding claims under federal racketeering law and naming Microsoft as a co-defendant. Neither the withdrawal nor the refiling altered the central, unresolved dispute the original complaint raised: what OpenAI’s founders actually promised each other in 2015, and whether the nonprofit’s subsequent commercial structure honoured it. The underlying case was still proceeding toward jury trial in 2026.