Fictitious, extraordinary, contrived—these are just some of the words used by Sam Altman’s OpenAI to describe the allegations in what it called Elon Musk’s “frivolous” and “incoherent” lawsuit against it.
Earlier this month Musk sued the nonprofit he helped create, claiming it violated its “Founding Agreement” by privatizing the successful development of what he frames as the world’s first artificial general intelligence, GPT-4, now in the hands of 49% shareholder Microsoft.
Musk demanded it follow tradition and continue to publish all of its research for the benefit of humanity.
In a filing with California’s Superior Court in San Francisco, lawyers for the company behind ChatGPT instead argued Musk was little more than a jilted backer-turned-competitor now looking to capitalize on someone else’s work so his new commercial startup xAI could play catch-up.
“The relief Musk seeks is as extraordinary as his claims are contrived,” they wrote. “The Founding Agreement is … a fiction Musk has conjured to lay unearned claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, then abandoned, then watched succeed without him.”
#3 This lawsuit seems like nothing more than @elonmusk trying to put some salve on a bruised ego because no one wanted him running @OpenAI. So what’s left for him to do? Sue … @elonmusk once told @JeffBezos that you can’t “sue your way to the moon.” @elonmusk you can't sue your…— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) March 6, 2024
Musk argued taxpayers incurred damages, too, since OpenAI began as a nonprofit only to change its status as soon as it came close to developing a commercial technology.
If allowed to stand, he believes this would become a de facto new fundraising model in Silicon Valley. (For-profit companies can however generate taxable losses for later use—Musk’s own Tesla for that reason booked a one-off $5.9 billion windfall gain last quarter.)
“Musk’s claims rest on convoluted—often incoherent—factual premises,” OpenAI’s lawyers added.
Early OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla, a well-known venture capitalist, labeled the lawsuit just a case of sour grapes on Musk’s behalf: “If you can’t innovate, litigate.”
Lawyers from Irell & Manella, the firm representing Musk, could not be reached immediately and did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.
Potentially more embarrassing emails still to come
Fearing the lawsuit is little more than a ruse to gather intelligence on OpenAI’s proprietary technology through discovery—a process by which claimants can demand access to internal information pertinent to their case—OpenAI asked the court to police all related demands with particular prudence.
I'm having real issues with this one. We have been hearing Elon hammering and shaming OpenAI about its move to for-profit for months when he, in fact, agreed that a for-profit move was the way to go – though only if he was in control either directly through a new entity or… https://t.co/RyXwD2IIiV pic.twitter.com/vutxIz7rjb— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) March 6, 2024
The company then went on to warn Musk that if he refuses to drop his lawsuit before it comes to the discovery phase, he could expect a lot more embarrassing documents to come to light.
This suggests OpenAI gave the entrepreneur only a glimpse of the documents it had collected over the years when it published a brief selection of damaging emails that showed Musk had long been in favor of ditching its nonprofit status.
“Were this case to proceed to discovery, the evidence would show that Musk supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI, to be controlled by Musk himself, and dropped the project when his wishes were not followed,” it claims. “Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself.”