OpenAI Asks Court to Bar Elon Musk From Unfairly Attacking It

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.