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In a surprise, Elon Musk has quietly withdrawn his lawsuit against OpenAI, and appears to instead be taking his arguments to the court of public opinion.
On Tuesday, Musk's lawyers applied to dismiss the case without explanation. Filed earlier this year in the Superior Court of California, the lawsuit claimed that OpenAI had breached its “founding agreement” by pivoting from a nonprofit group to becoming a “for-profit” entity that licenses its GPT technology to a major corporation—Microsoft.
In 2015, Musk helped found OpenAI with current CEO Sam Altman. He donated $44 million to the San Francisco lab, believing it would maintain its nonprofit status, the lawsuit said. Although Musk later cut ties with OpenAI, his legal challenge argued that the company was developing an artificial general intelligence “to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”
Musk’s lawsuit may have stalled because OpenAI had its own evidence to counter his claims. “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,” OpenAI said in its own filing.
OpenAI also claimed: “There is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk, as the complaint itself makes clear. The Founding Agreement is instead 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.”
So far, Musk hasn’t mentioned the lawsuit, but earlier this week, he posted several tweets criticizing Apple’s decision to partner with OpenAI and integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18, claiming it amounts to installing “spyware.”
“Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They're selling you down the river,” Musk said. Apple has said the ChatGPT integration will be optional and OpenAI will be restricted from storing user requests.
Musk, meanwhile, released his own ChatGPT competitor last year, known as Grok. It's been integrated into X to serve up news digests, among other things, with mixed results.