Elon Musk drops his legal action against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT

The billionaire, who co-founded the company before leaving it in 2018, criticized the company in particular for not having published its research freely, as it had committed to doing.

Elon Musk on Tuesday, June 11, gave up his legal action against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman, whom he had sued for having in particular violated, according to him, its mission as a non-profit company. One of the entrepreneur’s lawyers filed a document to this effect, consulted by AFP, with a San Francisco court reporting to the Superior Court of California. The lawyer does not specify, in this form, the reasons for abandoning the proceedings, which were initiated at the end of February.

Elon Musk criticized Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, with whom he co-founded OpenAI in 2015, for having “pulled to pieces” the founding charter of the start-up. In addition to the non-profit status, the latter notably provided that the technology on which OpenAI’s products were based be made available to the public, according to the so-called “open source” process.

However, OpenAI has not provided access to its GPT-4 language model, a program bringing together a colossal amount of data to allow software like ChatGPT to answer questions asked in everyday language. Elon Musk withdrew from OpenAI in 2018. In 2023, he created another start-up dedicated to generative artificial intelligence, xAI.

In the document initially filed at the end of February, the CEO of Tesla also denounced the agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft, under which, according to him, “GPT-4 is now, in fact, the Microsoft algorithm”. Elon Musk also accused Sam Altman and OpenAI of neglecting the assessment and control of risks associated with the development of generative AI.