Elon Musk sues OpenAI again, alleging ‘deceit of Shakespearean proportions’

Elon Musk is once again suing OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, resurrecting a legal battle against his former partners with a case that now claims they manipulated him into co-founding the artificial intelligence company.

Months after abruptly withdrawing a similar lawsuit without explanation, Musk filed a new lawsuit on Monday in a northern California federal court.

OpenAI denied the allegations in a statement to the Guardian, pointing to its previous blogposts about Musk’s initial lawsuit earlier this year.

Musk’s latest complaint claims the case is a “textbook tale of altruism versus greed”, repeating allegations in his previous suit that his former co-founders in OpenAI betrayed him by turning the company from a non-profit into a largely for-profit enterprise. “The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions,” it states.

Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, claimed the new lawsuit held vast differences from the case earlier this year. The latest complaint “holds defendants accountable for intentional misrepresentations to Musk and the public, and seeks the disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains on a grand scale”, he said.

Related: OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid

The lawsuit renews a legal battle between Musk, the world’s richest man and one of its most influential tech leaders, and Altman, who has become the face of the generative AI boom in recent years and a prominent industry figure himself. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before Musk left the company over an internal power struggle several years later . As Altman’s power grew , their relationship turned increasingly acrimonious.

Musk’s new lawsuit centers around a similar claim to the one he filed in February, arguing that Altman, his other co-founder Greg Brockman and OpenAI broke what he calls the “founding agreement” to develop artificial intelligence for the betterment of humanity. The company breached that agreement as it pivoted towards a partnership with Microsoft and became largely for-profit, Musk alleges, threatening humanity with reckless advancement of AI.

OpenAI and Altman vehemently pushed back against Musk’s original allegations, casting him as a bitter and petty ex-partner who was jealous of the company’s success after he left. In a March blogpost following the initial suit, Altman and other OpenAI executives published emails claiming to show that Musk always supported a shift toward for-profit status and stated: “We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired.”

“As we said about Elon’s initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon’s prior emails continue to speak for themselves,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the Guardian in response to the new lawsuit.

The new complaint contains additional allegations that OpenAI broke federal racketeering laws, Musk’s lawyer told the New York Times , and is “a much more forceful lawsuit” than the previous dropped suit. It also alleges that Altman and his associates participated in “numerous acts of wire fraud” through accepting financial contributions from Musk.

“​​After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI Inc, Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices,” the suit states.

Musk’s original case against Altman and OpenAI wound through California courts for weeks and included his lawyers successfully petitioning for a change of judge , but they pulled the suit without comment one day before a San Francisco superior court judge was set to hear Altman and OpenAI’s case for dismissal.

Musk also founded his own rival AI company last year, called xAI, and has pursued building a similar chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk’s chatbot has failed to gain the popularity or partnerships with big tech companies that ChatGPT has achieved, however, and faced backlash for spreading misinformation.

Five US secretaries of state announced on Monday that they planned to send a letter to Musk demanding changes to the chatbot after it promoted falsehoods about the 2024 presidential election.