Whip Bulls reported that on March 2, Elon Musk sued OpenAI today, accusing it of making a series of inflammatory remarks, including GPT-4 is actually a general artificial intelligence, and said that OpenAI is actually a closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft and no longer aims at the benefit of mankind.
The following is the full text:
It's a complaint that's funny to read; It fundamentally accuses OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of pretending to run a non-profit organization that aims to benefit humanity when in reality is running a run-of-the-mill tech company and trying to make a lot of money. Actually, it's a good critique of the whole OpenAI situation! At some point, it should be run by someone with a certain amount of knowledge, honesty, and a competent lawyer.
Sadly, Musk is not that kind of person, and his lawyers have found it more profitable to make the world's richest man spend a lot of time filing frivolous lawsuits than to make the facts conform to the law or whatever the average lawyer does.
Let's take the first cause of action in action as an example. It's a claim for breach of contract – it's a very, very simple claim that almost any first-year law student can assess, because the first step is to ask if there is a contract, and the second step is to figure out what the contract is. To enter into a valid contract, you need to make an offer, accept it, and exchange it for value – lawyers are trained to call it consideration, and they constantly strive to make simple concepts sound confusing and add to the fees.
Most importantly, contracts need to be written down – proving the existence of unwritten contracts, what their terms are, and whether they are enforceable is very difficult, and courts don't like to do this, especially for extremely complex parties with a long history.
My friends, Musk bluntly accused OpenAI of violating a contract that didn't exist. That's not a problem at all! The complaint mentions an agreement of formation, but no such agreement of formation is attached as evidence, and the claim for breach of contract acknowledges that the agreement of formation is basically the atmosphere that everyone captures in some emails. Seriously, this is what Musk's lawyer wrote:
Among other things, OpenAI, IncThe founding agreement was documented in the Articles of Association of the Founding Company and in numerous written correspondence between the plaintiff and the defendant over the years.(Lawyers use memorial as a peculiar way of saying it writes, because: incomprehensible language to pay bills.) ）
Then it proceeds to quote the articles of association, which is not a contract, which Elon Musk did not sign, but simply wrote the following:
The specific purpose of the company is to fund the research, development, and distribution of AI-related technologies. The resulting technology will benefit the public, and the Company will seek open source technology for the benefit of the public when applicable. The company is not organized for anyone's private benefit.There is no agreement between the two sides – perhaps OpenAI's intricate corporate structure (involving a nonprofit organization owning a for-profit company) upends the ideals set forth in this document, but Musk can't file a lawsuit on that because it's not a contract.
The accusation of breach of contract also refers to an email sent by Sam Altman to Elon Musk in which he said that the technology developed by OpenAI would be used for the benefit of the world, to which Musk replied: agree with everything.
I asked a few lawyer friends if there was anything like a contract, and most of them looked confused. This is in line with Musk's increasingly vague understanding of how contracts work. Just yesterday, a judge told X's lawyers that its breach of contract case against the Center for Combating Digital Hate involved one of the most tedious extensions of the law I've ever heard.
The whole complaint is more of an exam question than a real lawsuit — the second cause of action is the so-called promise estoppel, a concept that excites law professors and appears in the real world. Almost never. It's important to know that the richest man in the world is now trying to tell the court that he donated millions of dollars to a nonprofit without a written contract, which in some way undermines the nonprofit's promise. At least, it's very interesting.
Since then, the complaint has continued to fade into wet fart — with some all-encompassing state claims, then finally desperate accounting lawsuits, which under California law have two elements, one of which is the money OpenAI must owe Musk. That's an unusual expectation for a nonprofit's donation, to say the least.
Either way, my guess is that this case will continue to be a gold mine for U.S. law schools, as OpenAI's response will almost certainly be another favorite: dismiss the claims made by the motion on the grounds of failure.