Elon Musk’s AI lawsuit against OpenAI withdrawn just hours before hearing, ending contentious legal battle over the development of general AI

Elon Musk has announced the withdrawal of his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, for breach of contract. The decision was made just 24 hours before a hearing was scheduled to take place in a San Francisco court.

The lawsuit, initially filed by Musk in February 2023, accused OpenAI and its founders of breaching their contract with him by developing general artificial intelligence (AI) for economic reasons rather than for the benefit of humanity. Musk had previously served on OpenAI’s board of directors until 2018 and accused Microsoft, the company’s main shareholder, of transforming the project.

In response to Musk’s allegations, Altman published an article in Semafor stating that Musk had offered to lead OpenAI in early 2018 but that the company’s founders rejected his proposal as they believed Google was more advanced. After this rejection, Musk stepped down from the board citing a possible conflict of interest.

Last year, Musk founded his own AI company called xAI and developed a chatbot named Grok that was later integrated into the social network X. He also expressed plans to include Grok in Tesla cars, which he is CEO of. Despite his previous criticisms of Apple integrating Siri with ChatGPT, Musk has expressed intentions to collaborate with other companies in the AI field.