Elon Musk has added Microsoft and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman to the list of defendants in his long-running legal dispute with OpenAI. ChatGPT’s creator called the claim “baseless and exaggerated.”

One new amended complaint with the US District Court, Northern District of California, the rocket and electric car entrepreneur claims that Microsoft’s involvement in OpenAI — the highly regarded startup behind a string of attention-grabbing LLMs — amounts to anticompetitive practices.

Microsoft has been a close partner of OpenAI since 2019 and is said to have invested around $13 billion in the company.

Musk filed suit against OpenAI in Februaryalleging a breach of contract regarding the AI ​​company’s departure from open technology and its original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. That action was it later ended without explanationonly for Musk to launch a new process in August.

“Never has a corporation gone from a tax-exempt charity to a profit-making gorgon that cripples the $157 billion market — and in just eight years. It has never happened before because this violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators and lying to the public,” the new statement claims at the outset and continues in much the same vein.

Register gave Microsoft and OpenAI the opportunity to respond.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “Elon’s third attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims is even more baseless than the previous ones. His previous emails continue to speak for themselves.”

In March, OpenAI published a bunch of emails which seemed to show that Musk was not only aware of the need for OpenAI to become a for-profit entity — one of the central issues of the claim — but wanted to merge OpenAI into Tesla and become CEO.

The new amended complaint alleges that Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman and Dee Templeton, a Microsoft vice president, ran afoul of antitrust laws because they were both involved on the boards of OpenAI and Microsoft.

“The purpose of the cross-branch prohibition is to prevent the exchange of competitively sensitive information that violates the antitrust laws and/or to provide a forum for the coordination of other anticompetitive activities. Allowing Templeton and Hoffman to serve as OpenAI board members was undermined. this purpose,” the complaint says.

The filing also adds Musk’s AI startup xAI and Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member, as plaintiffs in the case. ®