12 former OpenAI employees have filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk. The data scientists and engineers argue that the ChatGPT maker has abandoned its non-profit roots and betrayed the mission that originally attracted them to the AI startup.
“If the OpenAI nonprofit agreed to a change in the OpenAI corporate structure which took away its controlling role, that would fundamentally violate its mission,” the former employees say in their petition.
The twelve employees, who all worked at the company between 2018 and 2024, are being represented by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig.
One of the petitioners in the case, Todor Markov, said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that their petition had nothing to do with Elon Musk and “everything to do with public interest”.
“We worked at OpenAI; we know the promises it was founded on and we’re worried that in the conversion those promises will be broken. The nonprofit needs to retain control of the for-profit.” Markov wrote in his post.
Why is Elon Musk suing OpenAI?
The world’s richest man has a chequered history with OpenAI, having co-founded the company with Sam Altman and a few other key individuals such as Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. However, Musk left the company in 2018 and later emerged as one of its biggest critics after it launched ChatGPT to the public in late 2022.
Since then, the billionaire has launched his own AI company called xAI, which has developed a chatbot called Grok. Meanwhile, Musk has also filed a plethora of lawsuits against OpenAI, with the one in question relating to the startup abandoning its purpose as a charity after accepting billions of dollars in support from Microsoft starting from 2019.
Musk has also targeted the Sam Altman-led company for working to restructure its structure so that the nonprofit would no longer have control.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has denied Musk’s claims stating, “Our board has been very clear: Our nonprofit isn’t going anywhere, and our mission will remain the same. We’re turning our existing for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation—the same structure as other AI labs like Anthropic—where some of these former employees now work—and xAI.”
