The plaintiff is conflicted. The legal arguments appear tenuous. And, in places, the 35-page lawsuit that Elon Musk filed last week with the Superior Court of California against OpenAI reads like a mash-up between a science fiction film script and a letter from a jilted lover. But Musk’s submission that OpenAI has breached its founding charter and endangers humanity by prioritising profit over safety may still turn into the most substantial move yet to scrutinise the company’s attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. 

Since releasing its ChatGPT chatbot to slack-jawed astonishment in November 2022, OpenAI has emerged as the world’s hottest start-up with more than 100mn weekly users. The FT reported last month that OpenAI had topped $2bn in revenues on an annualised basis and had surged to a private market valuation of more than $80bn. The company has attracted $13bn of investment from Microsoft while other investors, including Singapore’s giant Temasek fund, are clamouring to jump on board.

Yet OpenAI started out as a far less racy outfit back in 2015. As Musk’s lawsuit spells out, OpenAI was founded as a non-profit research laboratory with a mission to develop AGI — a generalisable form of AI that surpasses human capabilities in most domains — for the public good. Alarmed by the dominance of Google in the field of AI and the possible existential risks of AGI, Musk teamed up with Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator, to create a different kind of research organisation, “free from financial obligation”. “Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity,” the company stated. To that end, it promised to share its designs, models and code.