Elon Musk has just reinforced his legal offensive against OpenAI and Microsoft. The businessman, who often tops Bloomberg’s list of the world’s richest people, has updated his latest lawsuit. The amendment, presented on Thursday in a San Francisco court, adds new accusations of anti-competitive practices by the firm that created ChatGPT and includes the Redmond giant among the new defendants.
The updated lawsuit says OpenAI and Microsoft are monopolizing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). He also points out that from that dominant position “they are actively trying to eliminate competitors like xAI” by sharing sensitive information and limiting the ability of investors. xAI, remember, is Elon Musk’s AI company that has products like the Grok chatbot integrated into X.
A ‘de facto merger’ between OpenAI and Microsoft
The text from Musk’s lawyers assures that the company led by Sam Altman is unfairly benefiting from Microsoft’s infrastructure and experience in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). They describe this supposed dynamic as a “de facto merger”. Along these lines, they argue that xAI has been harmed by “the impossibility of obtaining computing capacity from Microsoft on terms as favorable as those received by OpenAI.”
An OpenAI spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that this “third attempt by Elon in less than a year to restate his claims is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones.” The businessman first sued OpenAI and Sam Altman in February of this year, although about four months later he dismissed the legal action without prejudice, meaning he could bring it again in the future.
And that’s what happened. Musk’s legal team returned to court in June, trying to bring down the multibillion-dollar dispute between OpenAI and Microsoft, and accusing Altman of intentionally misleading Musk. Added to this movement is the amendment that we have just learned about. It comes at a time when Musk is establishing himself as one of the closest allies of the president-elect Donald Trump after having been summoned to join a cuts team in the State.
The link between OpenAI and Microsoft emerged in 2019, when the Redmond giant invested $1 billion and became its preferred partner to market its products. At this point, OpenAI had promising technology, but it needed money and computing power to train and run its AI models, something Microsoft could offer thanks to Azure and its financial muscle. Investments escalated to $13 billion.
Despite this, the firm behind ChatGPT wants more computing power than Microsoft can (or wants) to offer it. The relationship between these companies begins to show the seams, with OpenAI looking for other sources of investment and trying to develop its own technological infrastructure. In time we will know how everything will end and whether Musk’s legal actions will have any impact between these companies.
Images | Steve Jurvetson | Steve Jurvetson | Village Global (CC BY 2.0)
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