The Tesla chief executive has renewed claims that the A.I. start-up put profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Elon Musk has revived a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT, refueling a six-year-old feud that began with a power struggle at the San Francisco start-up.
Like the original suit, the new complaint, filed on Monday in federal court in Northern California, claims that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Mr. Musk withdrew his original suit seven weeks ago, without an explanation, one day before a judge was set to rule on whether it should be dismissed.
After joining with Mr. Musk to create OpenAI in 2015 and pledging to carefully develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, the suit claims, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman abandoned this mission by entering a multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft.
Mr. Musk was “betrayed by Mr. Altman and his accomplices,” the suit said. “The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a blog post responding to Mr. Musk’s first suit against OpenAI, Mr. Altman and others at the company said that they intended to ask that its claims be dismissed and that the company aimed to serve the public good by building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.