OpenAI urges California, Delaware to investigate Musk’s ‘anti-competitive behavior’

April 6 (Reuters) – OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) has called on the attorneys general of California and Delaware to consider investigating “improper and anticompetitive conduct” by Elon Musk and his associates ahead of a hearing between the two sides that begins this month.

In 2024, Musk sued OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and others, accusing them of violating OpenAI’s founding mission as it restructured itself into a for-profit organization. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and launched rival ⁠xAI with chatbot Grok.

In an August court filing, OpenAI said Musk’s consortium tried to enlist rival Mark ⁠Zuckerberg for its bid for OpenAI early last year, but the Meta Platforms CEO did not participate.

The ChatGPT producer sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings on Monday, saying the lawsuit seeks more than $100 billion in damages from its nonprofit foundation, which it said would effectively cripple the organization.

A judge in Oakland, California, ruled in January that a jury would hear the trial, which is expected to begin in April.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in the letter sent Monday that the lawsuit could undermine the company’s efforts to ensure that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, benefits all of humanity.

Musk’s filings in the case “show that your offices did not thoroughly investigate OpenAI’s recapitalization plan and relied solely on promises about what OpenAI would do in the future,” Kwon said.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)