After months of legal disputes, Tesla and X, a social media platform, CEO Elon Musk has decided to withdraw the lawsuit against OpenAI and its two co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
Musk’s legal team filed a motion on Tuesday, June 11th, with the California Superior Court, seeking to withdraw the lawsuit without specifying the exact reasons for dropping the case to ensure judicial fairness.
Just a day before, Musk had issued a warning that if the iPhone manufacturer continued to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the operating system level, he would ban Apple devices from entering his company.
Musk took to X platform to express his concern, labeling the integration as “unacceptable security violation” and stating that he would prohibit “all Apple devices” from entering his company premises, even requiring visitors to store their Apple devices at the entrance.
As the CEO of SpaceX, Musk also pointed out that when Apple transferred user data to OpenAI, users were unaware of what was happening. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman in 2015 but later left the company. In February of this year, he sued OpenAI and its co-founders for violating the agreements made at the founding stage, which aimed to develop AI technology beneficial to humanity.
In the lawsuit, it was emphasized that “to this day, OpenAI Inc.’s website still claims its mission is to ensure the benefits of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for ‘all of humanity.’ However, in reality, OpenAI Inc. has become a closed-source subsidiary of the world’s largest tech company, Microsoft.”
Musk demanded that the court order the currently Microsoft-backed OpenAI to make its research results “freely available to the public” and prohibit anyone, including Microsoft, from profiting from their AI technology.
In response, OpenAI released excerpts from what appeared to be Musk’s private emails in a blog post on March 5th, exposing his alleged double standards regarding the company’s future direction.
The emails revealed that OpenAI required more funding than initially anticipated, leading Musk to suggest the startup raise $1 billion instead of the original $100 million. Musk also indicated that over time, the company becoming “less open” and not sharing research results with the public “was reasonable.”
OpenAI also stated that Musk wanted to have “majority ownership, initial control of the board, and act as CEO” in this for-profit enterprise, suspending funding during the negotiation period. Musk left OpenAI in February 2018.