In November, Elon Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s plan to transform itself from a nonprofit into a purely for-profit company.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco denied Mr. Musk’s request, calling it “extraordinary.” But the court allowed Mr. Musk to proceed with other aspects of a lawsuit he filed last year against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman.
Mr. Musk helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, along with Mr. Altman and others. In 2018, Mr. Musk left the organization after a battle for control of the company. Mr. Altman then attached OpenAI to a for-profit company so he could raise the billions of dollars needed to build artificial intelligence technologies.
But the nonprofit retained control of the company. Last year, Mr. Altman and his company began working on a plan to shift control of the company from the nonprofit to OpenAI’s investors as a for-profit company.
Soon after, Mr. Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Mr. Altman, claiming they had breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Later, Mr. Musk expanded the complaint to include claims that OpenAI had violated antitrust laws by asking investors to agree not to invest in rival companies, including Mr. Musk’s new artificial intelligence company, xAI.
“We welcome the court’s decision,” Lindsey Held, an OpenAI spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Elon’s own emails show that he wanted to merge a for-profit OpenAI into Tesla. That would have been great for his personal benefit, but not for our mission or U.S. interests.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Musk and a consortium of investors escalated his longstanding feud with Mr. Altman by offering to buy the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI for more than $97 billion. OpenAI’s board of directors later rejected the bid.
But the bid could still complicate Mr. Altman’s efforts to separate the company from the nonprofit board and raise the billions of dollars that OpenAI needs to build new technologies.
“We’re pleased the court has offered an expedited trial on the core claims driving this case, which in its words present ‘urgent’ issues in the public’s interest,” Marc Toberoff, the lawyer representing Mr. Musk, said in a statement to The New York Times.
(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.)
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