Elon Musk Drops Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman

Elon Musk withdrew a lawsuit he filed against OpenAI, a company he co-founded, on Tuesday, a day before a San Francisco judge was set to weigh whether it should be thrown out. The suit was dismissed without prejudice, meaning it can be filed again. Filed in February, it alleges breach of contract, with Musk claiming that OpenAI and its top brass had abandoned their original nonprofit mission to develop artificial intelligence and make it freely available to the public “for the benefit of humanity.” Instead, he said, the startup had succumbed to greed, putting commercial interests ahead of the common good, and pointed to a recent multibillion-dollar alliance with Microsoft as evidence of that. Two of OpenAI’s other founders, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, were also named as defendants in the suit. OpenAI rejected the lawsuit’s claims, calling them “incoherent” and “frivolous,” according to the Financial Times. In a March blog post, the company published several of Musk’s emails from its early days, with the mogul appearing to acknowledge the need to pursue profits.