Tech billionaire Elon Musk is once again taking his feud with ChatGPT developer OpenAI to court. The Tesla boss dropped the previous lawsuit in June.
Now Musk has stepped up his allegations: He claims that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and his “accomplices” had obtained his stake in the start-up under false pretenses. In the lawsuit, his lawyers speak of “perfidy and fraud of Shakespearean proportions”. In a response, OpenAI merely referred to previous allegations against Musk, according to which the tech billionaire had sought full control of the start-up.
First lawsuit withdrawn
In the first lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI in February of violating the founding agreement. The company, which he co-founded in 2015, had strayed from the agreed path of being a non-profit company whose research into artificial intelligence should benefit humanity, Musk argued.
OpenAI countered, among other things, that there was no formal founding agreement that could have been violated. Musk then backed out shortly before the first hearing on the case. US experts had given his lawsuit little chance of success.
Conspiracy to defraud?
Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff told the New York Times that the previous lawsuit was toothless and the new one is much stronger. Essentially, the allegation is that there was a conspiracy to defraud Musk.
A year ago, the AI chatbot ChatGPT triggered an unprecedented hype about artificial intelligence – with expectations ranging from almost unlimited possibilities in the digital world to the fear of the extinction of humanity. Such AI chatbots are trained with huge amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human. The principle behind them is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue.
