Elon Musk has surprisingly asked a California court to dismiss his lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman. The suit accuses the companies of abandoning their founding mission of developing artificial intelligence (AI) for the benefit of humanity.
The motion filed by the billionaire’s lawyers seeks to drop the months-long lawsuit without giving reasons.
The motion was filed just a day before the court was due to hear the ChatGPT developer’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The latest motion seeks to dismiss the lawsuit “without prejudice,” meaning Musk could reinstate the lawsuit at a later date.
The Tesla president filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in late February this year, alleging that the company he co-founded in 2015 has strayed from its altruistic goals and is now focused on making money.
OpenAI countered that Musk had previously supported the idea of a for-profit organization and even hinted at a merger with his own electric car company, Tesla.
The controversy intensified further earlier this week after Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to improve its voice assistant Siri and its operating system with OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
Following the announcement, Musk posted several messages on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) criticizing the merger.
One of the posts ended with the words, “Apple has no idea what’s actually going on when they hand over their data to OpenAI.”
However, investors seemed to welcome the news as Apple’s stock market value rose to a record high of over $3 trillion.
In July 2023, Musk founded his own AI company called xAI.
In November of the same year, xAI launched Grok, a chatbot with “a bit of humor” to compete with ChatGPT and similar companies.