by Key Takeaways
- Microsoft is now named in Elon Musk’s updated complaint against OpenAI, which claims the corporation gave OpenAI unfair competitive advantages.
- According to the lawsuit, Musk’s AI businesses, such as xAI, have suffered direct harm as a result of a “de facto merger” between OpenAI and Microsoft.
- It charges board members of Microsoft with allowing anti-competitive behavior between the two businesses and having conflicts of interest.
Microsoft and other parties have been added as defendants in Elon Musk’s updated complaint against OpenAI, which now alleges anti-competitive behavior.
Musk and OpenAI are still engaged in a legal dispute. Musk returned with a resurrected lawsuit in August after dropping his original one in July, in which he claimed OpenAI had abandoned its non-profit goal. In a recent development, he has updated the case to include more defendants.
According to TechCrunch, Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and Dee Templeton, a former board member of OpenAI who temporarily had a vice president position at Microsoft, are now included in the refiled lawsuit. It claims that they all participated in what Musk’s attorneys refer to as OpenAI’s “de facto merger” with Microsoft, which gave it the opportunity to unfairly take advantage of the tech giant’s resources and know-how.
The intimate relationship has directly hurt Musk’s own AI company, xAI, by providing OpenAI preferential treatment for accessing Microsoft’s computer capacity on far better terms, according to the 107-page lawsuit. It asserts that “an inability to obtain compute from Microsoft on terms anywhere near as favorable as OpenAI receives” has disadvantaged xAI.
The case also targets Hoffman’s alleged conflicts of interest as a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock, which made an investment in a rival to OpenAI that Microsoft later purchased, and his membership on the boards of both businesses.
Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink brain-computer interface business and the mother of three of his children, has been added as a plaintiff. Zilis, who resigned from OpenAI’s board last year, has standing as an “injured employee,” according to the document, who voiced internal concerns about OpenAI’s business practices that were ignored.
Musk’s key claim that OpenAI deviated from its original non-profit tenets, which he helped create, by opting to “actively try to eliminate competitors” like xAI by deterring investors from sponsoring them is upheld in the updated case.
Additionally, it revives an allegation that Musk objected to when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested the business introduce its own cryptocurrency prior to implementing its current “capped-profit” structure.
