OpenAI calls Elon Musk’s lawsuit ‘incoherent’ and ‘delusional’ in new court filing

OpenAI says it believes Musk’s lawsuit warrants an ‘early and swift dismissal’

ChatGPT company OpenAI has called Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the artificial intelligence firm “incoherent”, “frivolous”, and “delusional” in a court filing on Monday.

Mr Musk, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, sued the AI firm earlier this month, arguing that the company failed in its mission to “benefit humanity”.

The SpaceX and Tesla boss alleged that the AI startup’s chiefs Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman originally approached him to make the firm an open source, non-profit company when it was started in 2015, but is now focused on making money.

Mr Musk accused the AI company of violating its founding agreement, allegedly promising to never operate for profit.

Now, in a court filing, OpenAI responded to Mr Musk’s lawsuit, calling the multibillionaire’s claims “incoherent”, “frivolous”, “extraordinary”, and “fiction.”

OpenAI lambasted the Tesla chief’s lawsuit claiming “there is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk”.

The company said the supposed founding agreement was conjured up by Mr Musk to form the basis of a lawsuit designed to “advance his own commercial interests.”

It called the founding agreement “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”.

OpenAI said in the filing that it has evidence to show that Mr Musk himself supported OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit structure “to be controlled by Musk himself”.

“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. Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself,” the court filing stated.

“As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI said in a blog post last week, adding that “we couldn’t agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI”.

Citing these details, OpenAI said it believes Mr Musk’s lawsuit warrants an “early and swift dismissal”.

Years after leaving OpenAI, the Tesla boss started his own AI company xAI which launched its Grok chatbot in 2023 rivalling ChatGPT.

OpenAI alleges that the Musk lawsuit’s demand, which includes making the ChatGPT-maker’s technology open to the public, would “benefit Musk, whose own for-profit AI concern has not met with success in the marketplace.”

The SpaceX and Tesla boss called OpenAI “a lie” in a response to the AI firm’s latest comments, Bloomberg reported.