Tech billionaire Elon Musk revived a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Monday, renewing the claims that the firm places profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
The suit, which was filed in a district court in northern California, alleges that once OpenAI's technology started to transform generative artificial intelligence, Altman "flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in."
In June, the billionaire entrepreneur withdrew the lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, which accused them of abandoning the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit.
Attorneys for Musk had asked the California state court to dismiss the lawsuit, originally filed in February, without providing a reason for the move.
However, according to a report from The New York Times on Monday, the new complaint, like the original suit, claims that OpenAI and two of its founders, namely Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
In a blog post responding to Musk’s first suit against OpenAI, Altman and others at the company said that they intended to ask that its claims be dismissed and that the company aimed to serve the public good by building artificial general intelligence (AGI).
OpenAI, the company behind the AI boom, is considered the leader in the field and has faced heightened pressure in recent periods regarding the question of its mission with some prominent figures such as Ilya Sutskever, one of its co-founders and chief scientist departing earlier this year.
Musk, the boss of Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter, was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015 along with Altman but left the organization in 2018 and is now one of its most vocal critics.
