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Elon Musk has withdrawn his lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman three months after he accused them of compromising the start-up’s original mission to benefit humanity.
The billionaire owner of X and chief executive of Tesla filed to voluntarily dismiss his breach of contract claims at a San Francisco court on Tuesday. The filing did not elaborate on the reason for the dismissal.
In March, Musk had sued the $86bn start-up behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, alleging its multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft had broken an agreement to make a big breakthrough in artificial intelligence “freely available to the public”. He said OpenAI was working on “proprietary technology to maximise profits for literally the largest company in the world”.
OpenAI rejected his claims, calling them “incoherent” and “frivolous”. It published a blog post in March that included several of Musk’s emails from the early days of the company, which appeared to show he acknowledged the ChatGPT maker needed to raise large sums of money to fund the computing resources required to develop AI models.
Musk has had a long-running dispute with Altman. He helped co-found the company in 2015 and donated $44mn to the group, but left OpenAI’s board in 2018 after disagreeing with Altman on the direction of its research. A year later, the group established the for-profit division in which Microsoft has invested.
Musk launched his own AI start-up, xAI, last year and this year raised $6bn from venture capital and sovereign wealth funds to fuel its development. He has at the same time repeatedly warned about the dangers of the technology, last year calling it an “existential threat” to humanity.
Earlier this week, he criticised a new partnership between OpenAI and Apple in a post on X and said Apple devices would be banned at his companies if the start-up’s technology is integrated on to iPhones.
“Visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” he wrote.
OpenAI declined to comment. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
