OpenAI Requests California and Delaware to Investigate Allegations of Anti-Competitive Behavior by Elon Musk's Companies

OpenAI Seeks Investigation into Elon Musk's Business Practices

April 6 - OpenAI has written to the California and Delaware attorneys general, urging them to consider investigating Elon Musk and his associates' business practices. The move comes ahead of a trial between the two sides, set to begin this month. Musk sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and others in 2024, accusing them of violating OpenAI's founding mission as it restructures to a for-profit entity.

Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and launched rival xAI, with its competitor chatbot Grok. In a court filing in August, OpenAI had said Musk tried to enlist rival Mark Zuckerberg for the bid that his consortium made for OpenAI early last year, but the CEO of Meta Platforms did not come on board.

OpenAI's chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said in the letter sent on Monday that the lawsuit could undermine the company's efforts to ensure that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, benefits all of humanity. Musk's filings in the litigation "suggest that your offices did not thoroughly investigate OpenAI's plan to recapitalize and merely relied on promises about what OpenAI will do in the future," Kwon said.

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The lawsuit seeks damages of more than $100 billion from OpenAI's nonprofit foundation, which would effectively cripple the organization, according to the letter. A judge in Oakland, California, ruled in January that a jury will hear the trial, expected to start in April.

Note: The year xAI was launched was corrected to 2022 as it was originally stated in the text that xAI was launched in 2022, not 2018