Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s lawyers have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI and Microsoft in an attempt to stop them and other defendants named in the filing from engaging in alleged anti-competitive behaviour.
Filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, November 29, the motion for an injunction seeks to halt alleged illicit activities by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, LinkedIn co-founder and former OpenAI board member Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton.
In the motion for an injunction, Musk’s lawyers alleged that OpenAI discouraged investors from funding its rivals such as the Tesla CEO’s AI company called xAI. “Musk has verified that at least one major investor in OpenAI’s October funding round has subsequently declined to invest in xAI,” the document read.
It also alleges that the sharing of proprietary information and resources between OpenAI and its biggest investor, Microsoft, is illegal and amounts to “self-dealing,” which is harming marketplace competition.
Additionally, the motion accuses the defendants of having OpenAI throw business to organisations in which they have “material financial interests”. It notes, for example, that OpenAI chose Stripe as its payment processor to benefit Altman who has stakes in the platform.
OpenAI’s bid to transition to a for-profit company was also challenged by Musk’s lawyers in the motion for an injunction. “No objective observer can look at OpenAI today and say it bears any resemblance whatsoever to what it promised to be,” the filing read.
“An injunction to preserve what is left of OpenAI’s nonprofit character, free from self-dealing, is the only appropriate remedy. If not, the OpenAI promised to Musk and the public will be long gone by the time the court reaches the merits,” it further stated.
“Elon’s fourth attempt, which again recycles the same baseless complaints, continues to be utterly without merit,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
In February, Musk sued OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its original nonprofit mission of making the benefits of its AI research available to everyone. The lawsuit was initially withdrawn in July only to be revived a month later.
Content retrieved from: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-seeks-injunction-openai-microsoft-9699859/.
