OpenAI asked a federal court on Wednesday to bar Elon Musk from unfairly attacking it through a high-profile lawsuit he filed last year, the latest move in a bitter feud between the artificial intelligence start-up and the world’s richest man.
In a filing in federal court in San Francisco, OpenAI said Mr. Musk had “made it his project to take down OpenAI.” The company requested that the tech billionaire be stopped from taking “further unlawful and unfair action” against OpenAI and asked the court to hold Mr. Musk responsible for any damage he has caused the firm.
The filing was another sign of the acrimony between Mr. Musk, who was a founder of OpenAI, and the company over the direction of the fast-evolving technology. In August, Mr. Musk sued OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, claiming they were putting the commercial interests of the company and A.I. ahead of the public good with the technology.
In a statement, OpenAI said: “Elon continues to use bad-faith tactics in an attempt to slow down OpenAI for his personal benefit. These efforts are anti-competitive and go against our mission, which is why today we filed a countersuit to stop them.”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement regarding news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
Mr. Musk helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in late 2015, along with Mr. Altman and others. But that partnership fizzled after a battle to control the company and the evolution of A.I., with Mr. Musk leaving the organization. Since then, OpenAI has released ChatGPT and become a major A.I. player with hundreds of millions of users. Mr. Altman has raised billions of dollars for OpenAI to build A.I. technologies.
Last year, OpenAI began working on a plan to shift control of the company from the nonprofit to OpenAI’s investors. Soon after, Mr. Musk sued OpenAI, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, claiming they were breaching the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
This year, Mr. Musk and a consortium of investors offered to buy the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI for more than $97 billion. OpenAI’s board of directors rejected the bid.
In the filing on Wednesday, OpenAI described Mr. Musk’s bid for the company as “fake” and said he was misrepresenting the company’s efforts to change its corporate structure.
“Musk peddles the false claim that OpenAI is planning to ‘convert’ from a nonprofit into a for-profit enterprise,” the filing said.
Marc Toberoff, Mr. Musk’s lawyer, said in a statement, “Had OpenAI’s board genuinely considered the bid as they were obligated to do, they would have seen how serious it was. It’s telling that having to pay fair market value for OpenAI’s assets allegedly ‘interferes’ with their business plans.”
OpenAI has said it plans to restructure as a public benefit corporation, or P.B.C., which is a for-profit corporation designed to create public and social good.
In a separate move on Wednesday, a coalition of nonprofit, labor and other philanthropic leaders filed a petition to the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, to investigate OpenAI’s attempt to convert the company into a public benefit corporation.