By Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) -Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk expanded his lawsuit towards ChatGPT maker OpenAI, including federal antitrust and different claims and including OpenAI’s largest monetary backer Microsoft as a defendant.
Musk’s amended lawsuit, filed on Thursday night time in federal court docket in Oakland, California, mentioned Microsoft and OpenAI illegally sought to monopolize the marketplace for generative synthetic intelligence and sideline rivals.
Like Musk’s unique August criticism, it accused OpenAI and its chief government, Samuel Altman, of violating contract provisions by placing income forward of the general public good within the push to advance AI.
“By no means earlier than has an organization gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon — and in simply eight years,” the criticism mentioned. It seeks to void OpenAI’s license with Microsoft and drive them to divest “ill-gotten” positive factors.
OpenAI in a press release mentioned the newest lawsuit “is much more baseless and overreaching than the earlier ones.” Microsoft declined to remark.
“Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices have escalated,” Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff mentioned in a press release. “Daylight is the perfect disinfectant.”
Musk has a long-simmering opposition to OpenAI, a startup he co-founded and that has since turn out to be the face of generative AI by way of billions of {dollars} in funding from Microsoft.
Musk has gained new prominence as a key drive in U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. Trump named Musk to a brand new position designed to chop authorities waste, after he donated hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to Trump’s Republican marketing campaign.
The expanded lawsuit mentioned OpenAI and Microsoft violated antitrust regulation by conditioning funding alternatives on agreements to not take care of the businesses’ rivals. It mentioned the businesses’ unique licensing settlement amounted to a merger missing regulatory approvals.
In a court docket submitting final month, OpenAI accused Musk of pursuing the lawsuit as a part of an “more and more blusterous marketing campaign to harass OpenAI for his personal aggressive benefit.”
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; modifying by David Bario and Jonathan Oatis)