April 6 (Reuters) – OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) urged the attorneys general of California and Delaware to consider investigating Elon Musk and his colleagues for “inappropriate and anticompetitive conduct,” with a trial set to begin this month.
Musk sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman and others in 2024, accusing them of violating OpenAI’s founding mission when it reorganized into a for-profit entity. Musk served as OpenAI co-founder in 2015 but left in 2018 to launch rival xAI and its rival chatbot Grok.
In an August court filing, OpenAI said Musk tried to invite rival Mark Zuckerberg to join his consortium’s bid for OpenAI early last year, but the Meta Platforms CEO did not join.
On Monday, the maker of ChatGPT sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings saying the lawsuit seeks more than $100 billion in damages from its nonprofit foundation, saying it would effectively weaken the organization.
An Oakland, Calif., judge ruled in January that a jury will hear the trial, which is expected to begin in April.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in a letter sent on Monday that the lawsuit could undermine the company’s efforts to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
Quan said the documents Musk filed in the lawsuit “show that your office did not thoroughly investigate OpenAI’s recapitalization plan and relied solely on promises of what OpenAI would do in the future.”
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)