Elon Musk has unexpectedly requested a California court to withdraw a legal case against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, which accused them of straying from the firm’s founding mission of developing artificial intelligence (AI) for the benefit of humanity.
The filing by Musk’s lawyers asked for the months-old case to be dropped without providing any reason for the decision.
This request came just a day before the court was scheduled to hear OpenAI’s bid to have the case dismissed.
BBC News has reached out to Musk’s lawyer and OpenAI for comment.
The latest filing asked for the case’s dismissal “without prejudice,” meaning Musk could potentially reactivate it later.
The Tesla CEO had filed the lawsuit against OpenAI at the end of February, arguing that the company he co-founded in 2015 had shifted from its altruistic goals to prioritize profit.
OpenAI responded by noting that Musk had previously supported the concept of a for-profit structure and had even proposed a merger with his electric car company, Tesla.
The conflict escalated earlier this week when Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to enhance its Siri voice assistant and operating systems using OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
Following the announcement, Musk posted several critical messages on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, expressing disapproval of the collaboration.
One of the posts ended with the words: “Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.”
However, investors seemed to welcome the news, as Apple’s stock market value rose to a record high above $3tn.
Mr Musk started his own AI company, called xAI, in July 2023, which he said would aim to “understand reality”.
In November that year, xAI launched Grok, a chatbot with “a little humour”, in a bid to rival the likes of ChatGPT.