A U.S. federal judge denied billionaire Elon Musk’s request for a preliminary injunction to pause OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit model on Tuesday.
Musk does not have “the high burden required for a preliminary injunction” to block the conversion of OpenAI, said U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. She added that she wanted to resolve the lawsuit quickly because of “the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred.”
READ: Regulating AI: Sanjay Puri on policy, challenges, and ethical innovation (November 1, 2024)
Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and X, has been involved in a legal battle with OpenAI for a year now. While Musk accuses OpenAI—which he co-founded as a nonprofit in 2015—of deviating from its original mission of developing AI for public good rather than profit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman denies those claims, saying that Musk originally supported plans to make OpenAI a for-profit entity.
“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI also claimed that it needed to transition into a for-profit entity because its nonprofit structure wouldn’t be able to support the realization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
READ: AI and the media: Transforming content, distribution, and editorial leadership (December 10, 2024)
Marc Toberoff, a lawyer for Musk, said they were pleased the judge “offered an expedited trial on the core claims driving this case.”
“We look forward to a jury confirming that Altman accepted Musk’s charitable contributions knowing full well they had to be used for the public’s benefit rather than his own enrichment,” Toberoff said.
This comes shortly after Musk’s bid for an OpenAI takeover. The investor group Musk led had a $97.4 billion proposal for the control of OpenAI, in a move that Altman believes to “slow down a competitor.”