Elon Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI, but the AI startup (then posing as a non-profit) soon parted ways with the talkative Tesla CEO. Since then there's been a war of words and lawsuits—from Musk, at least. OpenAI has finally retaliated, asking a court to deal with what it calls harassment, bad-faith tactics and false information.
"Elon's nonstop actions against us are just bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit," OpenAI said in a statement on Wednesday. "Today, we countersued to stop him."
…"This is about control. This is about revenue. It's basically about one person saying, 'I want control of that startup'," said Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University.
Musk has his own AI company, xAI, as well-capitalized as you might expect it to be, but it smells of him (it was in the news recently for "buying", with stock, the microblogging website Twitter, which Musk already owned) and the BBC describes it as "lagging" the competition.
In February, Mr Musk made an unsolicited bid for OpenAI, offering to buy it for $97.4 billion, which Mr Altman rejected by posting: "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."
Previously:
• OpenAI and DeepSeek will cheat at chess to avoid losing
• OpenAI could watermark the text ChatGPT generates, but hasn't
• Scarlett Johansson denied OpenAI the right to use her voice. They used it anyway.
