Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and Sam Altman again

Elon Musk has revived his complaint against OpenAI after dropping a previous lawsuit, again alleging that the ChatGPT maker and two of its founders — Sam Altman and Greg Brockman — breached the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence technology to benefit humanity.

The new lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California on Monday says that Altman and Brockman “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture” by promising that OpenAI would be safer and more transparent than profit-driven alternatives. The suit claims that assurances about OpenAI’s nonprofit structure were “the hook for Altman’s long con.”

Musk made similar accusations in a “hilariously bad” lawsuit that he withdrew in June without explanation, which focused on claims that OpenAI breached its founding agreement between Musk and other cofounders to keep the company’s technology open source.

“This is a much more forceful lawsuit,” Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said to The New York Times. The new suit argues that OpenAI broke federal racketeering laws in a conspiracy to defraud Musk and that its contract with Microsoft would revoke the tech giant’s rights to OpenAI’s technology once artificial general intelligence (AGI) had been achieved.