A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Elon Musk’s request to dismiss claims brought by OpenAI accusing the tech billionaire of engaging in a “years-long harassment campaign” against the company.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled OpenAI’s counterclaims are “sufficient” and can move forward as part of the lawsuit Musk brought against the ChatGPT maker last year.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the artificial intelligence (AI) firm and its CEO Sam Altman last August.
He accused Altman of manipulating him into supporting the nonprofit by promising to focus on AI safety — a commitment Musk alleges Altman betrayed with OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft and push to become a for-profit company.
OpenAI, in turn, filed counterclaims against Musk in April, accusing the tech billionaire of engaging in a “relentless” campaign of attacks in the press and on his social platform X, as well as demands for corporate records and a “sham bid” for the company’s assets.
“Musk could not tolerate seeing such success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed,” the April filing reads. “He made it his project to take down OpenAI, and to build a direct competitor that would seize the technological lead—not for humanity but for Elon Musk.”
In March, the judge denied Musk’s request to block OpenAI’s for-profit conversion. However, Gonzalez Rogers said she was prepared to expedite the trial to the fall “given the public interest at stake and potential for harm.”
Musk and Altman have long been engaged in a feud, which flared up once again Monday when the former threatened to sue Apple for not including X or his AI chatbot Grok on the App Store’s list of recommended apps.
He accused Apple of making it “impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store,” which he claimed was an “unequivocal antitrust violation.”
Altman hit back at Musk, calling it a “remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
“I hope someone will get counter-discovery on this, I and many others would love to know what’s been happening,” he added. “But OpenAI will just stay focused on making great products.”
